Lab 3

Goal:
The goal of this lab was to teach the ability to use a series of geoprocessing tools in ArcGIS in order to determine suitable habitat for bears in Marquette, Michigan.

Background:
The purpose of this exercise is to create a map of suitable bear habitat in Marquette, Michigan using a number of geoprocessing tools.

Methods:
The first step was importing the study set of bears.  The XY coordinates of the bears were in an Excel spreadsheet that needed to be imported to ArcGIS.  In order to bring the coordinates into ArcGIS, they had to be imported as an XY event theme.  The issue was that with event themes there was no ObjectID field.  Making it impossible to do nearly anything with the data.  Because the data needs to be manipulated, the data was exported into a feature class and then re-imported into the map. The second step was locating the best bear habitat in Marquette County.  The first step for this was to determining what kind of land cover the bears were frequently found. This was done by summarizing the table by minor type. The top three habitat types were Mixed Forest Land, Forested Wetlands, and Evergreen Forest Land. The second step to do this was to create a buffer of 500 meters around the streams feature class, and then intersect it with the bear habitat locations.  The pieces where bears were then cleaned up using the dissolve tool. The third and final step was to find the best bear habitat that did not fall into any area 5km from urban or built up areas. The Urban and Built Up major type was selected, turned into a separate feature class, and then buffered with a distance of 5 kilometers. To finish, the erase tool was used to erase the DNR land from this buffered zone.

Results:
The results show that there are a number of different DNR management areas, and that they center around areas with a high concentration of steams, as that is where the most bears seem to be found.

Figures:

Sources:
"GIS Open Data." State of Michigan Coat of Arms. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 May 2017.

Information, Michigan Center for Geographic. "Michigan 1992 NLCD Shapefile by County." Michigan Center for Geographic Information, 01 Nov. 2002. Web. 09 May 2017

Resources, Michigan Department of Natural. "Wildlife_mgmt_units." DNR. Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Forest, Mineral and Fire Management Division. Natural Resource Information Services., 01 Aug. 2001. Web. 09 May 2017.

Center for Shared Solutions and Technology Partnerships. "Michigan Geographic Framework: Marquette County." Center for Shared Solutions and Technology Partnerships, 01 June 2014. Web. 09 May 2017