Final Project

Goals and Background: The goal of this project was to apply my geospatial skills I have learned in the semester to a real life problem. I asked the question, where should we look to find a place that we can study high permeability soil while being near an interstate for ease of travel and near a hospital so that a member of our team could be rushed to the hospital if he or she needed medical attention for a condition that could possibly necessitate it. I used various tools that I had learned in the semester to answer this question and produce a map showing the areas meeting my criteria.

Methods: To solve this question I used data from ESRI and from the Wisconsin DNR that was stored on my university's servers. All data I found I checked the appropriate scales that they could be used at in the meta data, making sure that they would be appropriate to display at the scale I would be mapping at. I found datasets of counties, then on top of these overlaid data of hospitals, interstates, and soils. With the counties layer, I selected the counties by attributes that were in Wisconsin, then created a new layer from the selection. I then used the these counties to clip the hospitals and interstates layers down to only Wisconsin. I then selected by attributes the high permeability soils and made a new layer from the selection. This layer I then intersected with a 5 mile buffer I made from the hospital layer. This new layer I then intersected with a 10 mile buffer I made from the interstate layer. This final layer took into consideration all of my criteria and is what I displayed on my final map. Below (figure 1) is the flow chart I made for this geoprocessing.

Figure 1

Results: The following map shows the areas of interest that one could study at given my criteria. 

Sources: 

ESRI:

Esri2013.DBO.USAData

WI DNR:

Widnr2014.dbo.gcsm_soil_characteristics