Site Suitability Analysis

Problem

The National Park Service is having trouble with black bears interacting with park visitors at Great Smokey Mountains National Park along the border with North Carolina and Tennessee specifically along roads and trails. The park’s biologists need to analyze the park to determine the best places to relocate the bears to that would meet their needs and alleviate the need for the bears to go to areas where human interactions could occur.

Analysis Procedures

Strategies

To address the problem, ESRIs ArcGIS Pro was used to perform a weighted overlay site suitability analysis. The data used included shapefiles of the parks roads, trails and streams, and a raster file of the topography/elevation and polygons of the vegetation. The client has provided a list of factors to determine which areas of the park will be least favorable, favorable, and most favorable for bear relocation. Tools employed in the analysis include Slope, Feature to Raster, Euclidean Distance, Reclassify, and Weighted Overlay.

Methods

Firstly I used the Slope tool on the elevation raster. I then used the Feature to Raster on the vegetation data. Then I used the Euclidean Distance tool on the road, trail and stream files. I then used the Reclassify tool on all of the resulting rasters for each of the 5 data files selecting 3 categories with 1 being the not favorable condition, 2 being the favorable and 3 being the most favorable. I then used the Weighted Overlay tool inputting at equal weights each of the 5 resultant reclassified rasters.

Results

Application & Reflection

In this assignment, I learned how to use many data parameters to conduct a weighted site suitability analysis. Some data parameters may be deemed more important in the analysis than others and if that is the case then this tool takes that into consideration. I also in the process learned how to convert shapefiles and polygon data into rasters and how to convert elevation data into slope measurements.

I was involved with the botany department in surveying endangered plants in North Carolina and I can see where in the case of a rescue scenario that a site suitability analysis could be employed to find the best locations to relocate populations of endangered plants that are not successful in their existing environment (i.e. their ideal conditions aren’t being met, development is encroaching, they are under attack from wildlife). The botanists would need to provide the data input on their optimal conditions (moisture, soil type, sunlight, slope, etc) and soil data from the USGS and rainfall data from NOAA/NASA, land development data from the local government entities, animal population data from the wildlife commission could be obtained to conduct the analysis.