Growing up and living in Waukesha County Wisconsin I have found a variety of activities that I enjoy doing and do regularly. Golf is one of these activities that I regularly participate in. Some of the best and most reasonable priced courses in Waukesha County are state owned courses that do a very good job of maintaining their courses but keeping the price at a level where college kids and younger can play at without breaking the bank. This project is to find the best location in Waukesha County for a new public golf course. State employees could use this information to put this new recreation area into existence.
Data Sources:
To answer this question of where to put a new public golf course, I needed data that had the information that would help me answer this question. I obtained this information from ESRI's 2013 USA data bases that my school, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire has given me access to. One of my biggest concerns with using this data is that I do not know if all of the golf courses will be in their golf course feature class. This feature class has golf courses from the whole United States and I don't believe that is will be completely accurate. New golf courses are being created all the time and this data set could be missing some. A county level dataset of all the golf courses, state land, highways, and rivers and streams in Waukesha county would have been more accurate.
Methods:
To figure out where the best location for a new golf course in Waukesha County was I decided there were a few criteria that needed to be met. Over the years I have golfed at a few courses that were close to the highway and the noise of the cars interrupted the serenity of playing a relaxing round of golf. Do to this I have decided that the land for the new must be at least 2 miles away from any major road. The next criteria is that the land must be at least 5 miles from the next nearest course. A good golf course is properly watered and maintained to being close to a water source is important. This new location is within 1 mile of a river or stream. Over the years I have had good luck with courses that are owned by the county or state being very high quality and beautiful so I have decided to find a piece of state owned land that hits each one of these criteria.
Below is a data flow model with the spatial layers (grey ovals) and tools used (blue square) to transform data sets into a map that can be used to answer this spatial question. The red oval at the bottom is the final feature class of the possible locations for a new golf course in Waukesha County.
Results:
After using multiple tools to manipulate different data classes to create a map of possible locations of a new golf course in Waukesha County, there is one section of land in the southwest corner of the county that is large enough and fits all of the criteria for the new location. This area is away from golf courses, roads, and near a river or stream and would be the ideal location for a new golf course.
This was a good project to get a feel of what doing something like this would be like in a real world work situation. It required the user to understand how to use different tools and they actually had to know how to use them to manipulate the data. If I had to do this again I would use data from the county to get more accurate information. I also just used parks as the state land and in real life these are already parks and would not and should not be turned into golf courses. This project had many challenges from decided what spatial question to ask to finding good data that could be used to answer the question. This was a good project that had many valuable real world applications.
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