GIS Portfolio
An animal corridor was needed between two separate portions of the Coronado National Forest to create a safe passage for bears. The criteria was elevation, landcover, and distance to roads. A Suitability Analysis was run on the stated criteria and added together to create a cost surface. The Cost Distance tool was then utilized for both portions of the Coronado National Forest using the cost surface as inputs. The two outputs were then used as inputs in the Corridor tool. The lowest cost values were extracted to delineate a suitable bear corridor.
The objective was to create a map of the Washington DC area highlighting the schools in Ward 7. In order to highlight the schools several important cartographic design principles had to be included based on Gestalt's Principles. These principles are "Visual Hierarchy" which creates symbols and map elements ranked according to their importance. The second principle is implementing adequate contrast to the map. The third principle is "Figure Ground" which creates an appearance that certain object appear closer to the map user accentuating their importance. Because our objective was to highlight the public schools in Ward 7 these objects were easily identifiable as the focus of the map by changing their size and color from the background. The final principle was creating a "Balance" within the map which involves creating a map with features that do not compete for space but complement each other.
The isarithmic map provides derived average annual precipitation in inches according to a model using point precipitation data for the 30 yr. period of 1981-2010. Due to the difficulty of interpolating climate data in mountainous terrain the development of the Parameter-Elevation Relationships on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) interpolation method was utilized. The PRISM method uses point data and an underlying grin such as a DEM or 30 yr. climatological average to generate climate paramters. The data was manually classed into 10 seperate breaks to classify the annual precipitation data for the 30 yr. perod of 1981-2010.
This is a model of the Wainiha River watershed in Kauai, Hawaii. A created pour point and the watershed delineation tool tool was used to delineate all contributing flow based on the created pour point. The newly created watershed based on our selected pour point was compared with a preexisting watershed created by the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD).