- Geography 5222 -
Final Project: Identifying Priority Conservation Areas
in Centre County
Objective:
develop
and implement an analytical workflow to
solve a problem with GIS
In this final project, the task is to identify priority conservation areas in Centre County, Pennsylvania. Using the same types of functions as in previous lessons, the final areas must fulfill the specific criteria listed below.
Greater
than 75 bird and mammalian species combined
Less than 10% of each study area occupied by roads, highways and interstates
High habitat
potential
Publicly owned land
Forested areas
Slope less than 15%
The above screen shot shows the elevation for Centre County, the darker grey areas being higher elevation and the white areas being lower elevation.
This screen shot above shows the areas of high habitat potential in dark purple for Centre County, PA with the light purple being areas with low habitat potential. The grid viewed in the background is the study sites used to collect species richness data (birds and mammals).
The above screen shot shows the lands which are publicly owned in dark purple and privately owned in blue over the study sites grid.
In the above image, the reclassified landuse grid demonstrates the areas which are covered by forests (in green) and the areas covered by vacant and unused land, residential areas, transportation areas, communication & utilities, water, mined land, public and semi-public land, vacant structures, reclaimed land, agricultural areas, recreation areas, commercial areas and industrial areas (in blue).
In the above image, one can begin to get a sense of which areas are to be considered as conservation sites.
In the above image, the species table has been joined to the study sites layer. A field was added and the total species of birds and mammals was calculated.
The above image shows the study sites in turquoise which are rich in species (greater than 75 birds and mammals).
The above image shows a screen shot of the areas selected which have a slope less than 15%.
Above is an image of the roads which intersect with the species rich study sites.
The above image shows a zoomed area of the buffered roads.
The above table shows the attribute table from the dissolved study sites with no roads (based on block id number) joined together with the information from the study sites attribute table.
The above table shows the percentage of the area within a site which is covered by roads. A series of calculations was done in order to achieve this. First the total area was calculated using VBA code. Next the road area was calculated by subtracting the new area from the area field in the joined study sites table. Finally, the percentage was calculated with the following formula: road area/area * 100.
Above is an example of a raster grid in which the areas in pink contain less than 10% road coverage.
The final step in the analysis is to multiply the different grids together to determine which sites are priority sites for conservation areas in Centre County, Pennsylvania. The multiplied grids are: the slope grid, percent roads grid, ownership grid, habitat grid and the forest grid. The areas above in blue are those priority sites for conservation (seen overlayed on the hillshade layer).