Lab 4 Mini Project

Goal:

The Goal of this project is to loacte and project the best area to place a recreational guide service that is placed in Brown, Kewaunee, or Door county Wisconsin.

Background:

Throughout my life I have always been an outdoor activist. Spending time outside, hunting, fishing, camping, and even visting parks. It was this passion and enjoyment from the outdoors that made me want to find the best location in Brown, Kewaunee, and Door county in Wisconsin. After living in this area for a couple of years I found a few parameters in which I would place a recreational guide service. They included being in the three counties, within five miles of Lake Michigan, one mile from a state park, and at least 3 miles away form an urbanized area.

Methods:

The methods used to find these few parameters where as follows.
First in order to better represent the states and the positions of the areas I needed to project the data frame in the UTM zoen for central wisconsin. By doing this all of the data although projected different would all be represented in the UTM projection presenting them in the most realistic way for that specific area. 

Next I needed to clip in the three counties of interest as a starting point for the parameters locations. By clipping them from the WI DNR metadata state county information I now could start the basis for the location

From there I needed to being location the area of interest. To accomplish this I needed to set up a buffer zone aroudn the few locations I was using as parameters. By selecting Lake Michigan usign a select by attribute I was able to buffer this new feature class by five miles. To be able to set the buffer around the parks systems I first needed to spatially join all of the parks that where completly within the three counties of interest. Once located I could buffer and dissolve all internal boundaries of the one mile radius. 

By intersecting the two buffers together as shown in figure 1.2 you could vividly start to see a general outline of where the best location would potentially be mainly in the upper peninsula of door county and around the edge of the bays in the remaining two counties. 

Lastly I needed to narrow my location by getting ride of any areas that where within three miles of an urbanized zone. I wanted to stay away from these areas by a few miles so costumers would not feel like they where in the middle of a city when they were supposed to be guided in the outdoors. I first set the buffer on the urban zones and then erased them from the intersected region thus leaving us with our best area for the guide service as seen in figure 1.3

Results: 

The results where as follows where the best area based on the four parameters would be in all areas highlighted in red. The main focuss for areas concentrated in the Door countie region and left a few small areas in Brown and Kewaunee. Further research would need to be done to find if these locations would be habitable for a building and if the land was purchasable. If not more studies would have to be donw and the parameters might need to be shifted to find a more feasible location. 

The following is a model built to represent the procces in which the maps where created.