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:
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| The final map of my recommendation to the Michigan DNR. |
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| 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
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