Chad Tinsley Geog 483 Lesson 9-10: Final Project Lesson Context: The purpose of this lesson is to apply

all of the analysis tools used in the previous lessons of this course to manipulate the provided data with the ultimate goal of finding the priority conservation areas within the sample area. Lesson Criteria: To be considered a priority conservation area, all of the criteria must be fulfilled within a space. The area must be home to greater than 70 bird and mammalian species combined, be considered an area with high habitat potential, be publicly owned and forested land, and be an area with less than 10 percent slope. Finally, the space must be located within a study block that is occupied with a limited number of roads, highways, and interstates. The study block must have less than 10% of its area occupied by the road corridors (estimated as 20, 50, and 100 meters wide for roads, highways, and interstates respectively). Lesson Summary: After adding all of the lesson 9/10 shapefiles, coverages, and tables into ArcMap, the first step is to specify the Geoprocessing environment settings. We specify the suitable folder for the work environment so that all of the tools used will be appropriately applied to the layers. The processing extent is set to the "boundary" layer so that only the data that lies within that area is processed while manipulating the data. The last step of setting up the environment for the lesson is to change the cell size. The cell size is set to 50 meters in this case, because it is the larger of the cell sizes used in the two original raster datasets provided. Eventually, all of the vector layers need to be converted to raster format for the purpose of using the ArcToolbox tools to reclassify and combine layers. However, a number of the vector layers need to be manipulated before being converted. First, the "studyareas" layer needs to be joined with a table that contains information pertaining to the number of species within each study. The original "studyareas" attribute table does not contain any information pertaining to either bird or mammalian species counts. That information is available in the stand-alone "speciesrich" table. "studyareas" and "speciesrich" have a field in common, "Block_ID", which can be used to join the tables for the purpose of adding bird and mammalian species counts to the "studyareas" table. Following the join, a new field can be added to the table and named "TotalSpeci". Using the field calculator, the counts from the birds and mammals fields can be added so that there is a field showing the total species count for each study block. This information is pertinent due to the criteria stating that the priority conservation areas must be home to greater than 70 bird and mammalian species. The next step is to buffer the different types of roads to represent the road corridor areas. A buffer can either be carried out to a specified distance, or to the distances of a particular field within the attribute table. Since roads, highways, and interstates all require a different buffer distance (20, 50, and 100 meters respectively), a field needs to be created within the "roads" attribute table. By selecting "rd_type" = road, the field calculator can be used in a new field named "Buff_Dist" and set equal to 20. That way only the roads polylines, and not the highways or interstates, will have a buffer distance of 20 meters. The same process is used in selecting highways and interstates and setting the appropriate buffer distance for the polylines. Now, when the buffer tool is used in ArcToolbox, the buffer distance can be set to the "Buff_Dist" field as opposed to a single distance for each polyline. A new layer is created through the use of the buffer tool and named "roads_buffer". Before this new layer can be used to identify the study area blocks with less than 10% of their area occupied by the road corridors, a

dissolve needs to be performed so that the overlapping polygons are all dissolved into one so that the area of the road corridors is correct.

This screen capture shows the road corridors created by the buffered roads layer. Notice how the roads, highways, and interstates are buffered different distances to mimic reality. Also note that this screen shot is taken before the dissolve feature, so the buffers overlap one another.

This screen capture shows another area after the dissolve tool is used. The dissolve tool is used so that when the area is calculated, multiple overlapping polygons will not factored in multiple times into the area equation.

For the purpose of identifying the blocks with a limited area occupied by the buffered road corridors, the "clip" analysis tool can be used. In the "clip", the "studyareas" layer is the input, with the "roads_buffer_dissolve" layer being clipped. The output layer can be named "studyroadsclip". The attribute table of this layer maintains all of the fields of the original input, "studyareas", which already

has an area field for the study blocks. Now, with the buffers clipped, a new "roads_area" field can be created. Simply use the calculate geometry feature to calculate the area of the "roads_buffer_dissolve" within each study block. Then another field can be created to find the percentage of the road corridor area with the equation roads_area/area*100. That new field now shows the percentage of each study area that is occupied by the buffered roads, highways, and interstates. Finally, a join is performed to join the newest layer to "studyareas" so that the "perc_rds" field is added to the attribute table so that when it is finally converted to raster format that value will be used to classify the data. Before converting vector data to raster format, a hillshade is created to be used as a backdrop in the final map layout by using the elevation layer and the hillshade surface tool. At this point, all of the vector layers can be converted to raster format using the "raster to polygons" tool. All of the layers need to be in raster format before reclassifying each layer into the areas that meet and do not meet each of the lesson's criteria. When converting vector data to raster format, it is crucial to select the correct "value" field that will be used to categorize each cell of the raster layers' data. The vector layers to be converted, along with their appropriate "value" field are listed below: "studyareas" - "TotalSpeci" "studyareas" - "perc_rds" "ownership" - "Ownership" "habitat" - "HabitPot" Now, each of the raster layers will be reclassified into two categories, values that represent what is called for in the lesson criteria and values that do not. For example, the raster layer with the "total_speci" values is reclassified into 2 categories, with the break value at 70.5. New values are set so that values under 70.5 are equal to 1 and values over 70.5 are equal to 0. In each reclassification, the values that meet the criteria (in this case the study areas must have more than 70 species) are set to 1 and those that do not are set to 0. This is critical, because when all of the layers are combined (multiplied), only the areas in which every layer has a value of 1 will continue to have a new value of 1 which will represent the priority conservation area. Anywhere that has a value of 0 and is multiplied to anything else will have a new value of 0 (anything multiplied to 0 equals 0). Each raster layer is reclassified just like with the "studyareas" "total_speci" layer with the appropriate break values and new values set to 1 and 0 as mentioned before. Before using the raster calculator to combine the layers, a slope layer needs to be created using the slope tool in the surface analyst tools. It is important to make sure that the output measurement is set to "percent rise" as opposed to degree for this particular lesson because we are looking for areas with less than 10 percent slope. Like before, this new raster layer can be reclassified into two values, with the break value set at 9.99. The new value is set to 1 for those areas with a slope of less than 9.99 and the new value is set to 0 for every area with a greater slope. The final step is to combine all of the reclassified layers using the map algebra raster calculator, a spatial analyst tool in ArcToolbox. As mentioned before, each of the layers are multiplied, so that any areas in which the value of at least one of the layers is 0 will continue to be 0. Only the areas in which each layer has a value of 1 will continue to have that value of 1 (1*1*1*1*1*1 = 1). This concept is better illustrated in the six screenshots of the reclassified layers below. The output of the raster calculator equation will show the priority conservation areas of having a value of 1.

These six screen shots are the reclassified raster layers representing each of the required criteria. From left to right top row and then bottom row, the colored areas, which are the values that were reclassified as "1", represent these six criteria: 1) Greater than 70 bird and mammalian species combined 2) Less than 10% of each study area occupied by buffered roads, highways, and interstates 3) High habitat potential 4) Publicly owned land 5) Forested areas 6) Slope less than 10% These are the layers to be combined using the raster calculator. When multiplied, only the spaces in which the colored areas overlap in every single layer will end up being the priority conservation area.

In the layouts below, I tried to create a map that is successful in displaying the priority conservation areas in the most visually appealing manner. I decided to include, in addition to the priority conservation area layer, the reclassified land use layer. The reclassified land use layer shows the areas that are forested, and those that are not. The land use layer is not essential in portraying the necessary information, but to me it does not hinder the map's effectiveness and the forested areas could be relevant information to a viewer. The layers are all set to 50% transparency and laid over the hillshade so that the elevation of the terrain can be seen. The final layout is effective in showing the priority conservation areas that meet all of the criteria of this lesson.