GIS I Lab 5: Mini Final Project

Introduction: The question I posed for this lab was which town in Lane County would be the best environment to create a home near recreation? My objectives are to maximize the accessibility to nature as well as well as minimize large amounts of traffic from cars and people. Specifically, I focused on the parameters for proximity to be at least thirty miles away from interstates, a mile or less from water bodies and state parks, with a town population less than or equal to 7,000 citizens. My intended audience is simply people who desire a connection to the natural world; perhaps to people who wish for a place to escape or would simply enjoy a quieter lifestyle.

Data Sources: For this particular question, I was able to use the data within the ArcGIS program under the Oregon file. My main concern for this project’s data is the age of the population data. It has been over four years since the last population survey was taken, and much could have happened within this time, therefore possibly changing my results drastically. Another concern of mine is the quality of water located near the town. My goal of this project was to determine a recreation friendly place to live; the data simply shows that water bodies exist there, but not necessarily if the water is swimmable and fishable.

Methods:

Objective One: Create the Geospatial Basis for Lane County

This required me to connect the data from the ‘mgisdata’ folder to my computer. This folder contained all of the feature classes I used in this project. From here I created a file geodatabase to hold all of my data in order to easily locate it. Next I allocated Lane County as the county I would focus on for the entirety of my project. This meant creating a new layer by exporting the data solely for Lane County. I kept the original projection for this county because it was already set to an Oregon projected coordinate system.

Objective Two: Add the Data and Create Parameters

For this step I added the feature classes for interstates, cities, waterbodies, and parks. I then used to ‘cut’ tool to reduce those feature classes to the size of Lane County, thereby speeding up the processing time for the future.

My first parameter was selecting a town smaller than or equal to 7,000 people. To execute this I queried the data under the ‘Select By Attributes’ tab. I then created a new layer from these selected points and deleted the regular ‘cities’ feature class.

My next desired limitation for the data of my project was to ensure that whatever town was desirable had a water body within one mile. To do this I created a one-mile buffer on the feature class. In addition, I utilized the dissolve tool to unify the lines amongst the buffer.

Next I wanted to also create a one-mile buffer around State Parks to ensure close proximity to the Great Outdoors. To do this I needed to query NAME LIKE ‘%State Park%’ from the parks feature class to reduce the type of park considered in my project. After creating the State Parks layer I created a one-mile buffer around that as well.   

Finally, I wanted to make for a less trafficked town by eliminating close proximity to the interstate. To do this I created a thirty-mile buffer and then proceeded to use the erase tool to create a zone at least thirty miles away from the interstate.

To connect the entire project together I used the intersect tool to create an input of the buffered layers: water bodies and state parks; the queried less than or equal to 7,000 people layer, and the erased thirty mile zone around the interstate. This resulted in the determination that Dunes City was the optimum place to build.  

Objective Three: Create a Cartographically Pleasing Map

To clean up my map I made sure that all of the layers were appropriately placed so they could all be viewed at the same time. This meant that I made the county layer ‘hollow’ to make sure that it was clear to the viewers. I only included the buffered zones of each parameter that I set up to make the map easier to view. In addition, I created a legend labeling all of the final results in a user-friendly manner. I also thought that it would be helpful to label the cities with less than 7,000 people so I did that, while specifically highlighting Dunes City with a star. In addition to creating the initial map of the county, I also added another frame with the exact same data to be able to additionally zoom in on Dunes City to see the lay of the land enlarged. I created a third frame as a locator map to show were Lane County was located in proximity to the rest of Oregon. I added a North Arrow as well as two scale bars (one for Lane County and the other for Dunes City) to get a better idea of the size of the areas mapped.

Data Flow Model for Lab 5 Parameters

Results: The final outcome of this project was determining that Dunes City, Oregon is a very good place to build a home in close proximity to water, state parks, and away from the interstate. Additionally, the small size of this town would allow for a quiet place to live, which is often appreciated by those who love the outdoors. This area was determined by using the intersect tool to connect all of the parameters.

Final Lab 5 Map

Evaluation: I truly enjoyed working on this project. It allowed me to utilize the tools I had learned throughout the course and apply it to something relevant and interesting to me. I faced few challenges, but the most bothersome was the difficultly in querying the parks data to just represent state parks. Through much trial and error, this was finally managed. If I redid this project I think I would have looked into more data from the county itself. This would have given me more specific feature classes to look at. Additionally, I would have selected an area of the county rather than a city to create a cabin, which would provide more privacy than the city limits.

Source: ESRI Software