Final Project: Best Vacation Cities in Door County, WI

Goal and Background:

This project was created to determine what the best vacation cities in Door County. Specifically, the objective was to find cities close to major roads for ease of access, close to parks, and near popular recreation attractions. This would be useful information for tourists and travel agencies in helping determine possible destinations or places to stay in Door County.    

 
Methods:

All data was first put into the same projection. Following this, Door County was selected and made into a new feature layer out of Wisconsin county data. This new Door County feature class was then intersected with U.S. recreation spots, parks, major roads, and city data to obtain feature classes that contain data for only that county. The Door County cities feature class was then buffered for a two-mile radius and intersected with the Door County roads feature class to obtain a feature class that contains cities within two miles of a major road. The Door County Parks feature class was dissolved to remove any boundaries within that featured class. The parks were then buffered and intersected with the Road cities feature class to find cities within two miles of a park. The Door County Recreation feature class was then buffered for a two mile radius and intersected with the new Park Cities feature class to obtain a feature class contain the best vacation cities.   

 

Figure 1. Date flow model to obtain Door County vacation cities.    

Results:

Figure 2. Results of geoprocessing data for Door County to determine cities closest to major roads, parks, and recreation facilities.


Sources:  

ArcGIS Content Team. (2003, 12 12). U.S. Major Highways. Data & Maps for ArcGIS . ESRI.

ArcGIS Content Team. (2005, 3 20). U.S. National Atlas Citites. Data & Maps for ArcGIS . ESRI.

ArcGIS Content Team. (2013, 4 26). U.S. Parks. Data & Maps for ArcGIS . ESRI.

ArcGIS Content Team. (2013, 4 18). U.S. Recreation Areas . Data & Maps for ArcGIS . ESRI.

Jarosh, J. (2013). Retrieved May 14, 2015, from Door County Visitor Bureau: www.DoorCounty.com/media

Jarosh, J. (2015). Tourism Spending Up $10 Million in Door County Last Year. Retrieved May 14, 2015, from Door County Wisconsin: http://doorcounty.com/2014/05/02/tourism-spending-up-10-million-in-door-county-last-year

Price, M. (2014). Mastering ArcGIS, Sixth Edition. McGraw Hill.

Vector Geoprocessing

Goal and Background:

The goal of this exercise was to show my ability to properly choose and apply geoprocessing tools to determine the suitable habitat for bears in the study area of Marquette County, Michigan as well as my ability to use geoprocessing tools through basic scripting in python.

 
Methods:
Part 1: Bear Habitat Suitability Modeling
First I created a feature class from the XY table of the bear data that was in an excel document. Next I added all the necessary data files to ArcMap and used the Intersect tool to create a new feature class that contains the ID number of the bears and the land cover type from the feature classes that contain the bear locations and the land cover. I then selected the top three habitats with the most bears. 
Next I determined what habitat was suitable for the bears by creating a new feature class that contained only the top three bear habitats. I then used the buffer tool (with the dissolve function) to select habitat within 500 meters of a stream. I intersected these two buffered layers and the result was the suitable bear habitat. 
I then determined what of the suitable bear habitat was located on Department of Natural Resources (DNR) land. I used the Dissolve tool to remove the different units on the DNR managed land feature class. I then used to intersect tool on the DNR feature class and the suitable bear habitat feature class to create a feature class containing suitable bear habitat on DNR land. 
 

Part 2: Introduction to Python Scripting

Results:

 Figure 1. This map demonstrates the results from section 1 as well as my data flow model for finding the most suitable habitat for bears in the study area.  

 Figure 2. This map demonstrates the results from section 1 of the python scripting showing the suitable areas for the development of tourist resorts. 

 Figure 3. This map demonstrates the results from section 2 of the python scripting showing the air pollution impact zones around the interstates in Wisconsin. 

Sources:  
Part 1: Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri).  
Part 2: Price, Maribeth. 2014. Mastering ArcGIS. 6th Edition CD. McGraw Hill. Lake data from Wilson, Cyril 2012, A comprehensive Lake features for Wisconsin, Unpublished data.