Applications in GIS Module 6B

The second part of this weeks module focused on creating a corridor modeling the ideal locations for black bear travel between two protected areas in the Coronado National Forest, AZ. The factors considered for suitable travel zones were distance from roads, elevation, and landcover. Elevation and landcover rasters were given and were reclassified to fit the given criteria. The roads shapefile was ran through the Euclidian Distance tool and the resulting raster was reclassified to fit the given criteria. All were combined using the Weighted Overlay tool and the resulting raster was used as the cost raster in the Cost Distance tool with the two protected areas. The two resulting rasters from the Cost Distance tool were processed with Corridor Tool. A threshold was chosen to limit the suitable area to within 10% of the most suitable locations resulting in the corridor seen above.

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Module 5 - Unsupervised and Supervised Image Classification

This weeks module focused on classifying images using multispectral signatures. Above you can see the completed classified land cover of Germantown, Maryland. To create this image above signatures were collected that correlated to each required feature. Then bands were chosen (R:4 G:6 B:5) that contained the largest separation amongst features to minimize spectral confusion. In the above image roads and urban areas were often confused leading to a much larger area of roads than actually exist. The inset map contains a classification distance map which displays the distance each cell is (spectrally) from the sample points with brighter pixels being further than darker pixels. This indicates that brighter areas have a higher chance of error.

Lab 5: M 2.2 Interpolation

This weeks module focused on identifying the best interpolation method for modeling the air quality over Tampa Bay. Four methods were tested using the same set of sample points Thiessen, Inverse Weighted Distance (IDW), Tensioned Spline (seen above), Regularized Spline. Thiessen Interpolation assigns all cells in the raster with the value of the nearest sample point. IDW calculates the value of all cells by considered multiple sample points nearby and giving closer points a higher weight than further points. Both Spline methods create a smooth surface over the sample points but the regularized version creates a smooth curvature regardless of the range of values in the sample meaning cell values can end up both above and below the minimum and maximum values found in the sample. The tension model attempts to fix this by constricted the curvature of values to the ranges found in the sample points.

GIS 6005 - Module 4

Above is a choropleth map of the population change percentage in North Dakota counties between 2010 and 2014. The colors were chosen to intuitively indicate bad (red) for population decline and good (blue) for a population increase. The legend patches were snapped together to give them an appearance of continuous color that mimic the continuous data in the dataset.

GIS Portfolio - Michael Malone

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