For this lab my spatial research question was: Where would be the ideal place to build a cabin in Taylor County, Wisconsin? This spatial research question was based on four specific criteria. The criteria were as follows:
- The cabin has to be located within at least one mile of a lake.
- The cabin has to be located within at least 25 miles of a hospital.
- The cabin has to be located at least 10 miles away from any major highway.
- The cabin has to be located at least 15 miles away from any town or city.
The criteria were personal and are intended for a personal audience such as my family, who are from the Taylor County area. I was looking for a location that is more isolated and peaceful versus a location that would be close to urban or built up environments. People searching for a place to put an isolated peaceful cabin near water in Taylor County may find the information I provide useful.
Several data was needed in order to answer my research question. First I needed the Wisconsin county files to find, select, and export Taylor County to my own geodatabase. Then, for the criteria, I needed data for major highways running through the county, towns and cities in the county, any hospitals located in the county, and the data for bodies of water in the county. All of this data was retrieved from the ESRI database under USA data. The only data concern I have is how recent the date is for the data on bodies of water. Bodies of water are susceptible to change the most out of all the data I used.
In order to find the most ideal areas to build a personal cabin, I had to use several spatial vector tools. I used buffer, clip, and erase the most. I did have to use a few non-spatial tools. For example, I had to use query for the bodies of water. I had to do this because not all bodies of water are lakes. Some bodies of water are marshes or swampland and my criteria specifically states that the cabin should be within one mile of a lake. I had to sort out lakes from the water data using query and use that data to determine a result. The rest of the criteria were less complicated and query was not necessary. For all criteria, I had to determine boundaries using buffer and then either clip that boundary or erase that boundary depending on the criteria. For example, when combining the hospital boundary with all the lake boundaries, I needed to clip everything within the hospital boundary. Lakes outside the boundary (further than 25 miles) were not an acceptable location for the cabin. Erase was used with the remaining two criteria. Because I wanted to be a certain distance away from major highways and towns I had to buffer then use erase to remove that from the existing ideal locations. The data flow model for this project was made in ArcMap and can be viewed below as figure 1.
Figure 1
The results of this project consisted of the ideal location for me to build a Cabin in Taylor County. Figure 2 below depicts the results. The largest map on the page shows the areas of interest for a cabin in Taylor County and the legend is to its lower right. There is a locator map as well showing the location of Taylor County in Wisconsin among the other counties.
Figure 2
My overall impression of this project was excellent. I really enjoyed setting up my own spatial question and answering it with hands on work and problem solving in ArcMap. I learned skills I know I'm going to use in the future. If I were asked to repeat this project, I would not change much. More options for the spatial question could possibly be presented. However, it boils down to the creativity of the individual, which is why I would not change anything about this project. It had immense flexibility and was set up perfectly. I faced quite a few challenges including setting up and organizing my data flow model. I used ArcToolbox and it was difficult at first to organize the tools. Other than that I did not face any challenges. This project was incredibly fun, and was my favorite lab out of all. I would do this again, and I may just answer another spatial question through ArcMap for fun.
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