Lab 4

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Lab 4 Information

The purpose of this lab was to create 50 random sites within Utah BLM land to conduct vegetation surveys at, then create a booklet for vegetation field techs to take out with them in the field so they can find the sites easily.

To do this, first I downloaded shapefiles of state land ownership boundaries, a boundary denoting the area of interest, and of roads within the area of interest, then loaded them into ArcGIS Pro. Then, I created 1000 random points using the "Create Random Points" tool, and constrained them to be within the area of interest boundary.

To create actual site boundaries, I used the "Buffer" tool to create a 20m diameter buffer around each point, so field techs know where the boundaries are for each vegetation site. Then, to ensure each point was actually on BLM land, I selected only lands owned by the Bureau of Land Management from the land ownership shapefile, using the "Select by Attribute" tool, then exported it as a new layer to my map. I then subset the vegetation buffers (not points...gotta make sure the full site lays within BLM land) I created to only those that had buffers that lay completely within the BLM land shapefile, and created a new layer of just the BLM buffers.

After subsetting by land ownership, I subset the sites again using the "Select by Attrbutes" tool, then the "Select by Features" tool, only keeping points within 500m of the nearest road with a speed limit 35mph or less. To choose the final 50 vegetation sites, I used the "Subset Features" tool to randomly select sites from the 411 sites that remained.

Finally, to create the field tech booklet, I created a map series from the 50 sites from the Layout tab, added a smaller zoomed out reference map to each map in the series, and adjusted the symbology of the roads so they were all labeled with road names. Then I added scale bars and other pertinent information and exported the map series as a 50-page PDF.

These maps could be improved with coordinates of each vegetation site location, because all they provide is a picture of the site and a small reference map with the nearest road on it (ideally). Also, listing the name of the road each site is nearest to, or manually going through each location reference map to make sure the road label shows up correctly would be helpful for figuring out the best way to get to each site.

Additional Downloads

High resolution (PDF) download of all vegetation maps available here