Lab 5: Pick your Project

Introduction: For this lab we were tasked to come up with our own project. This "Mini Final" Project had the following requirements. We needed to come up with our own spatial question that was pertinent and relevant. So I thought, what is more relevant then Deer Hunting?! The nine day gun deer season just ended and I got skunked! I wanted to get that big buck and it was no where to be found. So I thought I would let GIS answer that never ending question, Where did that Big Buck Go? My intended audience is my nine man deer camp because we are all asking the same question.

Data Sources: I got my data from the Wisconsin DNR and Eau Claire County. Some of the DNR data required metadata which can be found at http://dnr.wi.gov/maps/gis/documents/orig_vegetation_cover.pdf. My only data concerns is the accuracy of the vegetation cover layer, because when you compare it to aerial data it does not always entirely match up. Also I know that within the Eau Claire County Data that some of the roads provided are not roads but rather private drives.

Methods: The requirements that I set forth for this project were this stipulations:
Must be in the Forest Zone of Eau Claire.
Must be .3 miles away from a road.
Must be within some sort of Pine Habitat since we know from experience that they typically head to pines for cover when the area is cold or heavily pressured.
Must be within .3 of the Anderson Property lines.

Data Flow Model

This is the Data Flow Model of my project. In the end, I believe that I made it a lot more complex than it needed to be.

Results: What I found is that using the requirements that I set, limited the area of "Where the Big Buck could be". I was only left with two sections in the southern portion of my map. One made up of White and Red Pine and the other made of Jack Pine. This was a very interesting way to try and find the Big Buck but the data was not reliable enough to get a legit location. Most of the Jack Pine area in my map is actually made up of corn fields and Poppel Trees. I limited the vegetation type to Pine only because of the cover it gives deer. Now deer could really be anywhere, it doesn't have to be pines, they can just as easily be in White Oak territory as well but for this project I wanted to eliminate the oaks from my methods ( Because I hunted oaks and didn't see nothing!). Also by their being roads in the study that should not be their, that limited the final area as well because of the buffer I added from the roads. I will say however that they are portions of this map that lie within the vegetation type that I was looking for that I believe may be holding a Big Buck. The habitat in these locations does suit deer that are trying to hide from the hunting pressure, as well as hunker down on some nice warm pine needles to stray away from the blistering cold and these north winds. However, this habitat is also prevalent in the northern part of my property but was excluded from the study because of some of the unnecessary road buffers on the east and west end of the property lines.

 

Final Map



The " Big Buck" areas are displayed as the Pink and Purple overlays within the Property Buffer area.

Evaluation: What I would change about this project is some of the data. I would go in and delete some of the unnecessary roads so that they did not influence me study. I would also try and find another variable that I could swap for vegetation type. I would still show the vegetation, but as extra information not as a limiting factor. It was hard to compile all the requirements for this project because as a hunter I know that its never what it seems and they always are where you don't think they are. I guess that's just the way of the woods, as the real factor in finding that Big Buck is putting the time and effort into staying out for as long as you can. As a whole though, I believe this project was a success as I demonstrated the skills and tools I have learned in GIS and I now have ambition to do further work with wildlife management using GIS. I would like to present my recommendation the Wisconsin DNR as to why they should install another Bear Management Zone in the central forest region of Wisconsin. By doing this Lab 5 project, I now have an understanding of the tools and information needed to due a wildlife evaluation of an area.

Sources: Wisconsin DNR, Eau Claire County

Lab 4: Vector Analysis within ArcMap

Goal: To find the suitable habitat for Black Bears within our study area in Marquette County Michigan and to make our recommendation to their DNR as to where the Bear Management Zones should be. This will all be done using multiple geoprocessing tools in ArcMap.

Background: What we want to do here is find habitat that best fits Black Bears and where we should recommend that they install Bear Management areas. The requirements that we are given are:
1. Has to be within 500 meters of a stream.
2. In Suitable land cover types.
3. Within already existing Michigan DNR management areas.
4. Further than 5 kilometers from Urban or Built Up lands.

Methods: We first added bear location data to our geodatabase as a feature class. We had to add the X,Y data which was the coordinates that the bears were located at the time of the study. From here we took a look at what Habitat the bears were in when this data was recorded. To do this we did a series of spatial joins so that each bear now had a habitat type associated with it. After summarizing we found that the three Habitats that held the most bears were Mixed Forest Land, Forested Wetlands, and Evergreen Forest Land. Another tool we used was Select by Location and with that we measured 500 meters from a stream to see how many of the bears were near the stream at the time of the study. We learned that 72% of the bears were within 500 meters. The next tool was the buffer tool where we did something similar to the select by location tool but here we created a new layer from the 500 meter buffer. After buffering we dissolved the new buffered stream layer so that it was one contiguous layer and didn't have all the buffer boundaries overlapping on each other. Then we moved on to the DNR management areas and used the clip tool so that we only had the management areas inside our stud area. After dissolving that layer we intersected the management areas and the Suitable Habitat layer that we got from buffering and dissolving the streams. The last part of this study was to exclude all areas within 5 kilometers of Urban or Built Up lands. To do this we selected the Urban and Built Up lands from the land cover layer and then buffered that 5 kilometers. Once that was done we clipped that Urban Exclusion from our suitable habitat to get our final product. From here we made a series of cartographic decisions to display this information in the best way possible.

Results: What I gathered from this Lab is that I believe there is rather limited areas to install Bear Management Areas. There is only a couple areas that stand out and remarkably, the largest two contiguous areas for Bear Management according to Habitat don't have any recorded bears even close to them!


Figures:

The final map of my recommendation to the Michigan DNR.



A data flow model of the steps and tools taken to make the map.

Sources:


http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/mgdl/nlcd/metadata/nlcdshp.html

http://www.dnr.state.mi.us/spatialdatalibrary/metadata/wildlife_mgmt_units.htm

http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/mgdl/framework/metadata/Marquette.html