GIS Final Project

Goals and Background:
My spatial question for this project was: what areas provide suitable habitat for deer in La Crosse County Wisconsin?  Deer live in areas an appropriate distance away from major roads and urban areas, near water sources like rivers, streams and lakes, and in land cover types like forests, woody wetlands, and herbaceous cover.  Using tools like buffer, intersect, erase, and dissolve I will narrow down areas that have all the criteria in common. This information could potentially benefit hunters, wildlife enthusiasts, or members of the DNR who are tracking deer numbers in the county.  This project is important because it could be used for both recreation and ecological purposes.  Looking at the map, one will be able to easily identify exactly where the largest populations of deer should be or where their population needs to be controlled to go.

Methods:
I used the standard set of Esri data provided by ArcGIS that had been preloaded on the department server and added the cities, urban areas, highways, water bodies, rivers and streams, and county layers. I also found the vegetation layer on the Geospatial Data Gateway website entitled National Land Cover Dataset by State.  I then selected La Crosse County from the counties layer and used this to clip all the other layers.  I changed the coordinate system of the data frame to NAD 1983 State Plane Wisconsin South FIPS 4803 and projected all the other layers to match it.  Because my vegetation layer was a raster dataset, I had to use Raster tools to select the vegetation types of interest, which consisted of forest, herbaceous land, and woody wetlands and then clipped and projected it to match to other layers.  Then I used the raster to polyline tool because unlike the raster to polygon, it kept the cover types distinct and converted it to vector format so I could later intersect it.  I dissolved the internal boundaries that were in the urban and water bodies layers so it would not cause conflicts with the buffer later on.  I then used the buffer tool to buffer areas within 500 meters of rivers and streams and intersected that with the vegetation layer.  From this, I got a layer which showed suitable vegetation areas within a desired distance from water sources.  Next I made a 1000 meter buffer of the highways layer since this was an advisable distance from heavy traffic areas to avoid accidents, and erased it from my suitable vegetation layer and named the new layer Away From Roads.  I also made a 2000 meter buffer away from urban areas because deer should not be near cities and erased that from the Away From Roads layer.  This gave me my final layer of suitable habitat.  See figure one for work flow.

Figure 1: Work Flow for the Project with the final layer resulting in suitable habitat for Deer in La Crosse County, Wisconsin.

Results:

The result of my work shows area in La Crosse County that can be easily and safely inhabited by deer (figure 2).  The final layer shows land area near streams and rivers, in the proper vegetation types for deer, and away from highways and urban areas.   This area is the proper area for deer to live and avoid dangerous encounters with humans like car accidents

Figure 2: Final Map of Suitable Habitat for deer in La Crosse County, WI

References:

 Esri data base. USA Data. 2013., 5/2/2016.

  Geospatial Data Gateway. National Land Cover Dataset by State. 2011., 5/2/2016