Geography 335: An Introduction to GIS: Lab 4: Bear Habitats

Introduction
The main objective of this lab was to use a variety of geoprocessing tools in ArcMap in order to figure out the ideal areas for bear habitats that can be monitored by the DNR in the study area in Marquette County, Michigan.

Goals
1.) To map a GPS MS Excel file of black bears locations in Michigan.
2.) To determine the forest types where black bears are found in central Marquette County, Michigan based on GPS locations of black bears.
3.) To determine if bears are found near streams.
4.) To find suitable bear habitats based on two criteria.
5.) To find all areas of suitable bear habitat within areas managed by the Michigan DNR.
6.) To eliminate areas near urban or built up lands.
7.) Generate cartographic output.
8.) Generate a digital data flow model of the procedures used to determine suitable bear habitat in Marquette County, Michigan.

Process
First step that I took was to add the excel spread sheet of bear locations to ArcMap. This was a little tricky because the only way to add no spatial data into ArcMap and be able to use it is to create an "event theme". An event theme is a temporary display of X,Y coordinates in ArcMap. Once the event theme was in ArcMap I exported the data so it would be brought into ArcMap as a feature class. Now that I had all of the bear locations I needed to find the land types in the study area that most of the bears lived in. I added the landcover data of the study area to ArcMap and used a spatial join with the bear locations to find all the areas that housed black bears. From here I summarized the new joined data by the minor types of landcover and found that Mixed Forest Land, Forrested Wetlands, and Evergreen Forrest Land housed the most black bears. I next created a new layer that contained all areas that were Mixed Forest Land, Forrested Wetlands, and Evergreen Forrest Land.
Now that I knew the best land types for black bears I had to find out if bears lived near streams. I made a 500 meter buffer around all the streams in the study area and found that 72% of all the bears in the region lived withing 500 meters of a stream. I intersected the three land types with the 500 meter buffer around the streams and found all the preferred bear land types with in 500 meters of all the streams. The DNR was not interested in each different type of land type just the entire preferred bear habitats as a whole. So I used the dissolved tool to get rid of the inner boarders and created one large bear habitat.
The next dilemma that I faced was incorporating the areas that DNR are were legally able to monitor. So I added the DNR manageable areas for the entire county of Marquette and intersected it with my study area to find all of the DNR manageable areas inside my study area. With this new data I was able to intersect it with bear habitats within 500 meters of a stream to find all the bear habitats that the DNR is able to maintain.
The final step was to eliminate all the areas of the bear habitats that were within 5 kilometers of an urban or built up area. To do this I selected all of the area that are urban or built up from the landcover dataset. Once they were selected I created a new layer and then added a 5 kilometer buffer around these urban areas. After I had the buffers I erased the areas that they covered from the map to eliminate the bear habitats too close to urban sprawls. So after I erased the habitats too close to urban areas I was left with bear habitats that were within 500 meters of a stream, able to be maintained by the Michigan DNR, and over 5 kilometers from urban areas.

Results
Here are the results of my study.