Vector Geoprocessing

GIS Lab Exercise 4

By: Evan Kebus

Goal:

The goal of this lab is to be able to determine the land use types where black bears are found in central Marquette County, Michigan based on GPS locations of black bears. In this lab you will need to determine bear occurrence in proximity to streams and export this data. You will also need to find suitable bear habitat based within areas managed by the Michigan DNR while excluding areas near urban or built up lands. Finally you will need to be able to generate an aesthetically pleasing cartographic output and then create a model of the procedures that you followed to determine suitable bear habitat in Marquette County, MI.

Methods:

The first objective for this lab is to be able to identify different aspects of the data that you will be working with. Also identifying the types of files you will be using and the coordinate system.

The second objective asks you locate each land type and see how many bears are located in that area. Using the intersect tool compare land cover and bear locations to create a new feature class that contain the bear locations and which land type they are found in. Using the attribute table you will need to find the top three habitats where bears are located. The top three are Forested Wetlands, Evergreen Forest Land and Mixed Forest Land.

In the third objective you are asked to determine how many bears are located within 500 meters of a stream. Create a buffer of 500 meters around the streams and check for intersecting bears. Using the dissolve tool dissolve the new layer to make it easier to interpret. Use bear locations as target layer and dissolved stream buffer as source layer and then figure out how many bears are located in these selected areas. 

The fourth objective of this lab asks you to find suitable bear habitats. Find an area with the appropriate land cover type that is also within 500 meters of a stream. This can be done by using an overlay analysis tool. Spatially join the land cover types and bear locations within 500 meters of streams. Count the number of bears living in this selected habitat. 

For the fifth objective help the Michigan Department of Natural resources figure out a bear management plan. Use the DNR Managed layer from the political boundaries data set. Intersect the suitable habitat layer and the DNR Managed layer. Dissolve the internal boundaries to remove unnecessary units. 

In the sixth objective you are asked to use your data from objective five to find areas 5 km away from urban land but still in the initial zone. Create a new layer by selecting urban lands from select by attributes then buffer all urban areas with a distance of 5 km. Dissolve boundaries when this is complete to get a more appealing map. Finally erase all of the DNR management land areas inside of the 5 km area from urban land.

The final objective is to complete a cartographic map of this suitable bear habitat and to generate a model of the data sets, tools, and steps that you took in this exercise. 

Results:

Fig 1. Final cartographic map of suitable black bear habitats within Marquette County, MI

Fig 2. Model of the data sets, tools and steps taken in order to come up with suitable black bear habitats in Marquette County, MI.

Source:

Data was obtained from USGS NLCD, State of Michigan GIS data, Lab 4 open data share and the DNR Management Unit from the state of Michigan.