Habitats for Helen
This project was done for my senior exit hackathon. I chose to make a map on the suitability of places for me to live in Tennessee based on certain preferences I have about where I would like to live.
The map was made through analysis and calculations with ArcGIS Pro software.
Background
I'm a pretty outdoorsy person. I also have certain preferences regarding where I would like to live in the future. For this project I decided to make the following parameters for suitable areas for me to live.
Parameters:
- In Tennessee (no income tax)
- Near a hospital (what if there's an emergency?)
- Close to a river (I love swimming, fishing, and canoeing)
- Not right by a major road (too loud, I need peace and quiet)
- Nearby a state, local, or national park (I love nature)
- Nearby a hiking trail (Backpacking is a passion of mine)
- Close to a major city, but not in the center of it (I like space...and peace and quiet)
Analysis Steps
1. Initial Layers:
I started with six layers. During the Hackathon, I found and sourced each data layer for online sources.
The first layer has hospitals in Tennessee, the second is all the streams in TN, the third has all the roads in TN, the fourth had all of the recreational parks in TN, the fifth has all of the hiking trails in TN, and the sixth has all of the cities in TN.
2. Parsing the layers
The first thing I did was parse the roads and streams layers. I used the 'Select by Attributes' tool to only display major roads (roads labeled as highways, freeways, and interstates) and only display streams labeled as rivers.
3. Euclidian Distance
The next step was to calculate the Euclidian distance for the six layers. Euclidian distance in layman's terms is the distance between two points. In GIS, Euclidian distance creates a raster layer and measures the distance from each cell in the raster to the point of interest. In this project, the points of interest were the six original layers. The Euclidian distance tool was ran on each of the layers.
4. Reclassify
The next step was to use the 'Reclassify Tool' to reclassify the values generated from the Euclidian distance into three new values. The purpose of this is to give a weight to the distances that are near, in the middle, and far away from the target objects.
For example, I want to be near recreational parks, so the raster values of the calculated Euclidian Distance layers are divided into three parts. The lowest values (closest) are given a weight of 1, the middle values are given a weight of 0, and the highest values (farthest away) are given a value of -1.
5. Raster Calculator
The next step was to use the 'Raster Calculator Tool' to combine of of the reclassified layers into one. This involves using a mathematical equation to combine the values. In this case, I just added all of the weighted value layers together to get the sum.
What this does is essentially creates a suitability index of where I can live based on the requirements I had and the way I weighted the values for the reclassified layers. Finally, I used the 'Clip Tool' to clip all of the layers to only be in Tennessee.
