Vector Analysis, De Soto National Park, Lab 4

     This was a process-centric week. Now while that may be every week and all projects, relying on a certain order of skills to be accomplished or performed to create an end result, this week absolutely revolved around learning some particular skill ordering. What is the process for changing, selecting, and creating a geodatabase? What are the various ways you can run a query to select specific features by particular attributes? What is the difference between a spatial join and a feature layer union? These are only a few of the questions answered by this week's lab on vector data analysis which was accomplished in two parts. 

Ultimately the focus of the exercises that answered the above questions was in findign a suitable camp site in the De Soto National park based on a number of road, water, and conservation area criteria. Overlay and buffer analysis tools, which are two of the most widely used and practical ArcGIS tools, were utilized to compare and overlap these features to qualitatively highlight potential campsite locations. That is the subject of the map below.

From the above I would say my primary critique with my work this week is the lack of centrally identifying characteristics with the park. That is a limitation of the originally provided data sets. while I could look more into the park, that was beyond the scope of this week. However I did need to find supplemental shapefiles for the inset overview, which came from the US Census Bureau's Tiger files. 

Also, I did deliberately put the inset in miles and the park in kilometers for the scale bar. The base data is in UTM and meters, which translated well to kilometers for the park itself. But for the average viewer i wanted them to be able to associate the larger overview region in miles, with a nice round number there, 100. 

The other aesthetic goal was to highlight larger areas as the priority for campsites. That is why the darker greens are the desired areas, and the smaller areas almost blend in with the background. This was a deliberate choice to down play them, but still have them discernable for those wanting that. 

This was a successful lab and served well at building an understanding of multiple tools and their uses in taking real data and providing an analysis for practical purposes. Thank you.

V/r

Brandon