Have you ever lost a mountain? How could you lose a mountain if you wanted to? Well the next few weeks will be spent looking at Special Applications in GIS that can be used to analyze mountain top removal. Mountaintop removal and valley filling are a common practice most particularly dealing with coal mining. The Appalachian Mountain chain in the mid eastern United States is an area that is particularly afflicted with this form of mining. The mining essentially involves peeling away the surface of the earth including, trees, brush, soil to get at the rocky layer beneath to harvest away the precious precious coal. This is the premise of the project encompassing the next few weeks posts. This weeks objective is to skim the surface of what mountain top removal is, means and does. Then create a basemap for the study area that I will be exploring for the next few weeks. This project has both an individual and group component. Deliverable's like the map below still have to be done independently but much of the upcoming analysis will be broken down into manageable chunks to be done in groups with a final group presentation project a couple posts from now.
The basemap above gives an overview of the study area that is being broken down by group and a look at the chunk that belongs with the group to which I am a part. Many things have been done to what was originally a DEM layer to show the Elevation, Streams, and Basins depicted in the group sliver of the study area. Essentially a mosaic raster was made out of 4 DEM sections which were then paired down to their extent that falls within the study area. From there multiple tools were applied to the mosaic to generate the streams and basins. Essentially holes in the pixel database had to be filled with a fill tool, this makes it so when running a subsequent flow analysis there arent holes for the "flowing water" to go into. Flow direction is applied to see how and where water would or should move given the overall contours of the elevation slopes. From there a calculation is ran to determine what actually correlates to a running stream. This calculation funnels into a conditional statement tool identifying areas that should be streams. And last from there a feature class is created from that entire process and then displayed appropriately.
What does this have to do with coal? Well one of the big problem sets associated with this subject matter is in determining how much land are we losing once an area is subjected to MTR? If this is a good before picture we can then take an after or during picture and calculate the difference. Overall you should keep checking back to see where we go with the data at hand.
In the mean time you might find these resources interesting. The first is a Story Map which displays the 6 stages of Mountaintop Removal for your perusal. This next Journal Map is the building blocks in progress toward a final compilation for the project to be finalized in the next couple weeks. Thank you.
The basemap above gives an overview of the study area that is being broken down by group and a look at the chunk that belongs with the group to which I am a part. Many things have been done to what was originally a DEM layer to show the Elevation, Streams, and Basins depicted in the group sliver of the study area. Essentially a mosaic raster was made out of 4 DEM sections which were then paired down to their extent that falls within the study area. From there multiple tools were applied to the mosaic to generate the streams and basins. Essentially holes in the pixel database had to be filled with a fill tool, this makes it so when running a subsequent flow analysis there arent holes for the "flowing water" to go into. Flow direction is applied to see how and where water would or should move given the overall contours of the elevation slopes. From there a calculation is ran to determine what actually correlates to a running stream. This calculation funnels into a conditional statement tool identifying areas that should be streams. And last from there a feature class is created from that entire process and then displayed appropriately.
What does this have to do with coal? Well one of the big problem sets associated with this subject matter is in determining how much land are we losing once an area is subjected to MTR? If this is a good before picture we can then take an after or during picture and calculate the difference. Overall you should keep checking back to see where we go with the data at hand.
In the mean time you might find these resources interesting. The first is a Story Map which displays the 6 stages of Mountaintop Removal for your perusal. This next Journal Map is the building blocks in progress toward a final compilation for the project to be finalized in the next couple weeks. Thank you.
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