Project Proposal

Question/Problem

Identify shortfalls in the South Dakota Wildlife Damage Management program (location of staff stations, amount of damage staff, hotspots locations, etc.) through identifying drive times and hotspot locations.

Methods

Data Acquisition, Organization & Preparation

South Dakota State will provide me with the points from each wildlife damage complaint including species type. South Dakota state will also provide me with the locations of their Wildlife Damage Specialists and their coverage areas. I will get road data from South Dakota’s DOT.

All data will need to be properly projected across the USGS topography map (GCS 1984).

Spatial Analysis

To determine hot spots, I will find ‘Hot Spot Analysis (Gi*)’ because it helps to show where there are clusters of complaints along with their significance. Perhaps some clusters are flukes or outside the normal. Since I am trying to determine if coverage areas need to be changed it is important that the hot spots I find are true hot spots. I am unsure what attribute table value to use here until I see the data and once that is assessed I may switch to ‘Average Nearest Neighbor’ instead. I will use information from South Dakota State and from the data created with ‘Hot Spot Analysis (Gi*)’ to determine what makes a hotspot a severe hotspot. These hotspots will use a color-coded gradient to show severity based on number of occurrences (red (most severe) to light red (least severe)), considering the significance (p-values). The hot spot data is saved to an output feature class which will be the point file that I used, or I may create a new one to save that data to.

I will most likely create polygons around hot spots and save them into their own layers to be used with the route finder.

I will then take the areas with the highest significant concentrations of complaints, overlay those over the Specialists’ assigned coverage areas. Depending on if the coverage areas are provided in raster or vector data will determine the tool(s) I use to determine which station is responsible for which hot spot. I might need to convert the raster to a polygon.

Any areas that are considered severe that are outside of a coverage area will be selected and symbolized separately to showcase them separate from the other hot spots.

Other Methods

After I have the polygons of the hotspots within each coverage area I will find the center of the polygon and use the route solver in the Network Analysis extension to determine the distances, route and travel time between the assigned duty stations and the hotspots.

Project Purpose

By finding the hotspots within each Specialist’s coverage area and then the distance from that station to the hotspot, the Department of Game, Fish, and Parks can make changes to their Wildlife Destruction management plan. These changes could include, relocating, adding, or removing duty stations, expanding, or shrinking their coverage areas, hiring more staff and/or relocating current staff. This analysis will also help them to identify new or emerging hotspots that need to be reviewed and decisions made with.

Plan of Attack

Lab 10 is going to be due November 15^th?

If so, start Final Project during Lab 10 week to have full five weeks.

1. Collect Data (2 day – November 9-11)

a. Complaint points

b. Duty station locations

i. Coverage area for each duty station

c. South Dakota road maps

2. Input data (2 day – November 11-13)

a. Project into correct coordinate system

i. Most of state is in NAD 1983 UTM Zone 14N, West side is in NAD 1983 UTM Zone 13N

b. Check point data for errors, doubles, and other irregularities

3. Analyze data (9 days total)

a. Incident Data (2 days – November 16-18)

i. Use Hot Spot Analysis tool to find significant cluster areas (or Average Nearest Neighbor)

ii. Draw polygons around points and create separate layers for each hotspot

1. Symbolize/annotate what significance is

b. Coverage Data (2 days – November 18-20)

i. Make sure duty location points have XY coordinates

1. If not, find XY coordinates using ‘Find XY’ coordinate tool

a. MUST be in the correct projection

ii. Convert coverage area as needed

1. Should be a polygon to intersect

c. Incident/Coverage Overlay (1 day if not coding this part – November 23-24)

1. Select where the severe polygons are not covered by coverage areas

Polygonobject = ‘shapefile for severe spots’)

diff = Polygonobject.difference(‘shapefile for coverage’)

2. Create new feature layer from selection

a. Using:

ap.MakeFeatureLayer_managment(diff, ‘layer name’)

Or a combo of make feature layer and an SQL from diff, will have to play with it. Still new to arcpy.

b. Symbolize to showcase where needed coverage is missing

d. Distance Calculation (3 days – November 24-27)

i. Find centroid of each hotspot polygon

1. Centroid might not work depending on how route solver works, might need to be a road versus random spot in a field

a. Will have to do more research and assess capabilities when the time comes

ii. Determine which coverage area it is in and which duty station it belongs to

iii. Find nearest road to centroid

iv. Use route solver to find quickest route between center of hotspot and its assigned duty station(s)

4. Map clean-up and edit (1 day – November 28)

a. Add legends, author, data, explanation, etc.

b. If time allows add a map of potential better routes

5. Write-up and video presentation (3 days – November 30-December 2)

a. Explain steps and tools used (1 day)

i. Explain where the data comes from

ii. Elaborate on Network Analysis usages and learning process

iii. Compare and contrast different methods (kernel vs. cluster) and I chose the one that I did

b. Create video (3-5 minutes) (2 days)

i. Screen sharing video with voice overlay

1. Explain the point of the map as well as the usage of

2. Future improvements

3. Additional data not shown on the map