Final Project - Bobwhite Manatee

Hello fellow Argonauts.   Here are the links for my final project concerning the Bobwhite-Manatee project proposed by FPL.

This was a time consuming yet rewarding project.   It really felt like "real world" type of work.   I really enjoyed the process.

Here is the Presentation: Bobwhite-Manatee Presentation

And the Slide by Slide Documentation: Slide-By-Slide Documentation

Hope everyone else did well on this assignment and I'll see you next semester !

Loose Ends Lab

Loose Ends Lab

Process Summary

By: David Jenness

Part 1:

Task 1:  Examine the different areas of the Order, Source, Visibility, and Selection.  Important to note which ones let you change the order and see non-spatial data such as tables.   Answered Question 1 and 2.

Task 2:  Create layer groupings (which really come in handy during tasks at my job).

Task 3: Look at graphing, which was something I haven’t done much with personally, so it is good to see how to view this data.  Answered Question 3.

Task 4: Understand purpose of Raster Pyramids (Which I use for several things at work in relation to our Imagery)

Task 5: Work with map templates.   This was very useful to view as it can really save a lot of time when creating new maps.   At work sometimes I know we have to repair the “normal.mxt” file.   Answered question 4.

Task 6:  Using the Dynamic text features (especially in conjunction with the map templates) should really help save me some time in future assignments.   Answered Question 5.

Part 2:

Task 1: Really found the breakdown of the various Geodatabase types helpful.  In particular, the difference between the “File” and “Personal” database description helped me answer a question of a coworker.   Answered Question 1.

Task2: As a database guy, it was really helpful to see the difference between the ObjectID, FID, and OID which I have seen all of during various projects.   Also got to get the clarification to not use them in joins.  Answered Question 2.

Task 3: Attribute field types are pretty familiar to me, but great to get the clarification on how ArcGIS does it.  Answered Question 3.

Task 4: Feature types (vs. Feature Dataset) is an important aspect of ArcGIS I always seem a little fuzzy on.   This section helped clarify that someone.   Answered Question 4.

Task 5: Map delivery is another topic that comes up at work pretty regularly, so it was good to see it addressed in this lab.

Task 6 :  Glad to see that ESRI really understands the concept of “portability” of their creations within ArcMap.    Answered Question 5.

Task 7: Path Names and Data sources come up at work whenever we do a server improvement (like a few weeks ago to our SDE server moving from Oracle to Microsoft SQL).   Great that they covered how to repair the data source.   Answered Question 6.

Task 8: Data Driven test pages seem like a great concept for further getting the information in the hands of the people that need it.   Answered Question 7.

Task 9:   The Map Page Size is a VERY important concept especially when working with the various plotters we have available at my office.

Task 10: Geocoding can be a real great way to augment a project to really provide useful information to the end users.

Google Earth Lab

Here is my summary of my Process Summary (The complete version was turned in via Dropbox):

Site Selection Justification

The reason I chose the site I did was to get a steady stream of electricity while minimizing impact on local residents.   Some of the factors I had to consider were wind speed, Ornithology, Noise, Shadow Flicker, Shipping Impact, and Landscape and Visual Impact.

The site I chose was near Harbor Beach, Michigan.     I chose this site by researching some of the buoys located here :  http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/maps/EastGL.shtml  

I noticed that the area near Buoy HRBM4 had good wind generation based on the previous 45 days’ worth of data (was generating over the 5 m/s needed over 52 percent of the time).   I also noticed that slightly north of this area, there is a lot of forested land that is a good distance away from local residents.   In researching the town, I noticed that they pride themselves on being the home of the world’s largest man made harbor, so it shows the residents are open to the idea of harvesting the environment,.

I also researched some of the migration paths of birds (there will be some impact on all species in the great lakes area.   It is important to make that known and debate the impact before proceeding with the project. 

I also researched the impact of noise and shadow flicker and determined that this will be mitigated somewhat by the distance to populated areas as well as the vegetation.  Shipping lines should not be impacted as the primary lanes are over 20 miles offshore.

Landscape and visual impact should not be affected too negatively.   I think that the wind farm could actually serve as a tourist destination for teaching schools how a community has helped mold their environment to harvest the natural resources of wind (this new facility) and water (The world’s largest man-made harbor)

Here is the map of the location:

And zoomed out further to see location:

Dot Mapping

Here is my map and Process Summary for this week's assignment

Process Summary

1.       Copied the files from the R: drive to the S: drive
2.       Read through the instructions completely
3.       Experimented with the layers in the Illustrator file a bit to get familiar with them.
4.       In Excel, made a new sheet only including: Manatee County, Sarasota County, Hardee County, Desoto County, Highlands County, Glades County, Hendry County, Charlotte County, Lee County, Collier County,St. Lucie County, Martin County, Palm Beach County, Broward County, Miami-Dade County. Monroe County.  This will let me base my stats on just these counties.
5.       The majority of my time was spent trying to determine the best dot size for my map.    This was based on a lot of trial and error.     Originally I wanted to try to do 2000 total points, but at this scale I couldn’t get the dots to fit into my Dade County.   So I tried making a smaller dot size with no luck so I decided to bump down the number of total points
6.       I determined with my legible dot size that I could get a little over 400 dots of this size into Miam-Date county so I started with that.   And I also wanted to make sure I had a few points in the most sparse county so I took my original number and determined it was about 66% of that.   So my final numbers for each county came out to be:

Glades County	2
Hardee County	5
DeSoto County	6
Hendry County	7
Monroe County	15
Highlands County	17
Martin County	24
Charlotte County	27
St. Lucie County	36
Collier County	48
Manatee County	50
Sarasota County	62
Lee County	83
Palm Beach County	214
Broward County	307
Miami-Dade County	426

7.       Using some simple math I determined that each dot represented 5288 people.
8.       So now the fun began.    A LOT of cutting and pasting, arranging, re-arranging to get the dots to fit my counties given special consideration to avoid rivers and wetlands.
9.       If I had it to do over again, I probably would have zoomed in on the area of interest of South Florida a bit before starting to place dots.
10.   This exercise makes me appreciate how hard these procedures would be without some of the software tools that we rely on.

Georeferencing Rasters

Here is my Map for this week's assignment.

Process Summary

1.      Read entire lab
2.      Task 1 – Read the article at the link provided.
3.      Watched the video.  This looks like it will be a very powerful tool.
4.      Added this week’s  ZIP data from the repository to my S: Drive
5.      Opened ArcMap and added the Buildings and Roads shapefiles
6.      Added uwf_n.jpg file by dragging it from ArcCatalog
7.      It shows up nowhere near the shapefiles (which is to be expected)
8.      Opened the Georeferencing Toolbar
9.      Did a “Fit to Display” from the georeferencing toolbar to get the imagery to show around the general area that the shapefiles are located
10.  Set my 5 Control Points
11.  Expanded this to include 10 control points
12.  Answered Questions 1 and 2.
13.  Completed the “Update Georeferencing” command
14.  Verified that the uwf_n.jgw file exists and looked at the layer properties and saw the spatial reference as 1983 HARN State Plane
15.  Added the uwf_s1.jpg to my map and used the “Fit to Display” command
16.  Added my six control points
17.  Added additional control points (for a total of 12) to experiment with the different levels and their effect on the RMSE error.   You can see Question 3 and Question 4 for more information on these steps.
18.  Updated the Georeferencing on the south imagery
19.  Removed the Background color from the south map
20.  Moved the North file about the south file.   Unfortunately I see I have a gap in between my north and south values so I may have done something wrong.   I went back and tried doing it with the 2^nd order polynomial and this gave me a MUCH better looking result
21.  Used the Editing toolbar to trace the gym and give it the attributes such as building number and height.
22.  Used the editing toolbar to add the road.   Always have to be sure that I “finish sketch” before saving.   Set my Attributes to show “Campus Ln” and a suffix of Ln and Description of “Lane” similar to the other roads.
23.  Opened up ArcScene
24.  Added all of the layers as listed in the lab.
25.  Set each layer’s properties to float on top of the UWF_DEM
26.  Set the Extrusion levels to give the buildings their height
27.  Set the Scene Exaggeration to 5
28.  Positioned the scene the way I wanted to see it
29.  Exported this out to a 2 dimensional JPEG
30.  Used ArcGIS to add my standard map necessities (legend, neatline, title, etc…)
31.  Filled out my metadata.
32.  Submitted my map to the dropbox and posted to blog

This project was really a lot of fun with the 3D aspect of it.