Maps and Figures

Final Project Overview

Data Page 1 | Data Page 2 | Maps and Figures Page | First Draft

Progress Update Overview

• What data are already visualized?

  1. • All the water level data, pelican GPS points, piezometer locations, and waterbody boundaries of interest are all visualized.

• What data still need to be visualized?

  1. • Not data necessarily, but visualizing some of the predictive capabilities (if any!) of the water level model still needs to be done.

• What needs to be changed about existing visualizations?

  1. • Gotta make 'em look pretty!

Project Overview

This project is exploring peripheral Great Salt Lake wetland water levels and available American white pelican foraging habitat. Essentially I'll be creating a water level model using Great Salt Lake bathymetry data and estimating water levels around the lake. From those water level estimates, I'm going to try to calculate how much wetland area is submerged at a given water level and is therefore available for pelicans to feed in.

Maps

• What data did you make maps for?

  1. • I made maps for the area of interest, and some of the smaller wetland areas that see a lot of pelican use.

• What can be improved about your maps?

  1. • I still need to add titles, legends, captions, etc. I also need to get coordinates of the Saline, UT water level gauge and plot that on the map, because I feel like it's of interest.

Figures

• What data did you make figures for?

  1. • I made a table of waterbody area based on lake level, and figures of weekly water level means for both the Saline, UT water level gauge and wetland piezometers.

• What can be improved about your figures?

  1. • I definitely need to improve how they look...add titles, clean up the axes, etc., and I still need to subset the piezometers to only include ones that are located within the wetland areas that see high pelican use...the water levels are the others are irrelevant and just muddy up the figure.

Steps Taken

First, I converted the reclassed water level raster (the rainbow raster from Data Page 2) to a polygon, using the Raster to Polygon tool. Then, I hand-drew a custom area-of-interest boundary covering the eastern portion of the Great Salt Lake using the Edit toolbar.

To determine areas of highest pelican use and define their boundaries, I created a heatmap from pelican GPS points, using the Kernel Density tool. I reclassified this raster to 99% of pelican GPS points to determine areas of highest use (the points are highly clustered, so I had to choose a large value to get a useful area delineation). Then, I ran the Raster to Polygon tool to convert the new 99% use rasters to polygons.

Then, using the Clip too, I clipped the 99% polygons to the boundaries of my area-of-interest polygon so I didn't overshoot Great Salt Lake wetland boundaries. I also clipped the piezometer points to the 99% use polygons, since water level measurements from piezometers in areas pelicans don't use aren't terribly useful for my project.

With the finished waterbody boundaries , I calculated polygon areas in km², using Calculate Geometry within the attribute tables of the 99% use polygons, "lake" boundaries, and "wetland" boundaries (as designated by the USFWS Utah wetland delineation shapefile I've been using [see Data Page 2 for data credits]), to get a few different metrics of measuring available waterbody area.

Finally, I used Summarize Within in the attribute tables to calculate the submerged area at each water elevation bin within each 99% use, lake, and wetland polygon, copied those values to an Excel spreadsheet, and then calculated total waterbody area by Great Salt Lake level at the Saline, UT water level gauge.