Lab 3: Bear Habitat Model

Goal:


The goal of this lab is to use various geoprocessing tools for vector analysis in ArcGIS to determine suitable habitat for bears in the study area of Marquette County, Michigan.


Background:


The Michigan Department of Natural Resources is interested in creating new areas for black bear management.  They recorded the location of sixty eight bears in a study area in Marquette County Michigan.  Using data from the Michigan Geographic Data Library, it is my job to determine the best areas for these new bear management locations. 


Methods: 


To find the optimum places to have new bear management areas, I used a variety of different spatial tools and skills to narrow down the data.


The first step was to transfer the bear locations from a Excel table to data points that could be used in an ArcGIS format.  Once the bear locations were in ArcMap, I used a spatial join to determine the suitable land cover types that the majority of bears were found within. Next I wanted to determine if being near a stream was consistent with the locations of the bears.  I used the buffer tool to create a 500 meter bubble around the streams then I used an intersect tool to find out that over 70% of the bears were located within 500 meters of a stream.  To bring this information together, I used the intersect tool to find the areas that were suitable land cover types and were within 500 meters of a stream.  This gave me the best areas that management zones could be incorporated in.  After reporting this data to the DNR they decided that the management areas should be 5 Kilometers away from any built up or urban areas.  Using a series of tools I made another map that fit into these parameters.


I also used the python script in ArcMap to complete some of the tools in the lab manually.   Below is a screenshot of the script used. 

Attached to the bottom of the page is a data flow model of the different data classes and tools I used to complete this project.





Results:


After determining the best areas for bear habitat and where the bears are actually located, I created a map that shows Bear Locations, Bear Habitat Management Areas, Streams, Suitable Bear Habitat and the Area of Interest.  It is apparent that there are a multitude of areas that are within 500 meters of a river, in suitable bear habitat, and are 5 kilometers away from urban areas.   This map could be very useful to a person at the DNR trying to decide where they should put bear management areas.

Sources:
Michigan Geographic Data Library

State of Michigan Open GIS Data
http://gis.michigan.opendata.arcgis.com/



Data Flow Model