Problem Statement
You were hired by a recently established conservation organization called Global
C
onservation Initiative (GCI). GCI is working on a conservation project in Hawaii and is
interested in determining the direct environmental impacts of a development proposal
that intends to allow the expansion of urban, commercial, industrial, and agricultural
areas in the island of Hawaii. The approval of this proposal will allow the expansion of
these kinds of uses 3 miles outwards from the limit of current anthropogenic zones (i.e.
created by humans). The following list includes all the possible anthropogenic zones
found in the area:
- Commercial and service areas
- Confined feeding operations
3.
Cropland and pastures
- Industrial
- Industrial and commercial complexes
- Mixed rangeland
- Mixed urban or built-up land
- Orchards, groves, vineyards, etc.
- Residential
10.
Strip mines, quarries, and gravel pits
- Transportation and communication service
areas
- Transitional areas
Fig. 1 Chasiempis ibidis
Your job is to generate a report
that assesses the potential impacts of this proposal on
the natural habitats in the study area. The direct impacts can be assessed by determining
the extent of each habitat that could be potentially affected by establishing a new
development outbound. GCI provides you with a shapefile with a series of nesting sites
of a few bird species including the species elepaios
(Chasiempis ibidis)(Fig. 1) that has
been listed as an endangered species. The report should indicate the total number of
ACTIVE Chasiempis ibidis
nesting sites that could be potentially affected by the
passing the proposal. Additionally, it should clearly show the number of Chasiempis
ibidis active nesting sites that can be found within each natural habitat that could be
potentially affected
Data
The site http://water.usgs.gov/GIS/dsdl/ds240/index.html contains a series of
historical land use and land cover maps for several regions of the US developed by the
United States Geological Service (USGS).In the section “Download land use and land
cover data sets using clickable image map”, download the layer that corresponds to
region of “Hawaii”:
Create a LAB4 folder on your flash drive and save the zip file there. Unzip it and
open the layer in ArcMap.
On CANVAS, go to “Assignments à
StudyArea_NestingSites.zip. This file contains the shapefiles of the study area
(study_area.shp) and nesting sites of three different bird species that include
Chasiempis ibidis (nesting_sites.shp).
Add these layers to a new map view in ArcMap. If you zoom in to the extent of
the study area, your map view should look something like this:
2
Processing Hints
Since both the nesting sites and land use/land cover maps comprise areas much larger
than the actual study area, we should clip both layers using the study area boundary. This
technique is usually used to reduce processing time, especially when the datasets are very
large.
Use the clip tool under “Geoprocessing” to cut both layers to the study area’s
extent.
The input features are the features you want to cut or clip. The clip features are
the features used to cut the input features (think about clipping as using a cookie
cutter). The following example shows the clipping procedure for nesting sites.
You need to clip each layer (land use and nesting sites) one by one.