Special Topics in GIS: Network Prep

Greetings,
     Welcome to week one of my Special Topics in GIS class. This class is organized into 4 larger real life style projects, dedicated to a particular topic. These projects will be broken down into multiple weeks with different aspects explored each week. The overall flow should go, project preparation during the first week, analysis the second, and presentation of the project the following.
      This first project is dedicated to an incredibly relevant topic at present. It looks at network analysis as it relates to Hurricane or other natural disaster response. The overall end goals for this project are to find and produce the shortest / most efficient routes to many locations as necessitated by the project. Locate the closest facilities to particuclar areas, Define and determine service areas based on existing facilities. Create a network using GIS data.
       The subject area for this project is Tampa Bay Florida, which is currently in the path of some tropical storms and could very easily have flooding in areas depicted on the base map below. Being the prepare week the overall objective is to acquire the data necessary for a base map and further analysis. The data was all provided by UWF including an elevation layer, point data for fire, police, hospitals, schools designated as shelters, and a national guard armory supply drop location, and roadways. The biggest aspect to the analysis this week was preparing the potential flood zones. This involved me taking the baseline DEM and reclassifying it into appropriately usable elevation increments. I changed its default measurements to differentiate elevations by 1 foot increments between 0-10, then 10-20, and 20+ for the study area. This reclassified DEM was then converted into a polygon feature class for easier subsequent processing. It was identified that flooding is most likely to occur in areas less than 6 feet of elevation. As such, all those areas less than 6 feet were selected and exported as their own feature class. You can see all of these aspects culminated in the map below.

Here you see the Tampa Study area as it relates to most likely flood zones, with transportation arteries that would be affected. This is just a basic overview of the area and facilities present for the next weeks analysis phase of the project. I will keep you updated on the project as it goes from week to week. Thank you.

Application in GIS: The Final

Hello and welcome to my final posting for Applications in GIS. This is the final which is based on running a suitability analysis. This project from proposal through execution is entirely user defined. That is, I created the criteria I used for the analysis, and put together the project as I felt necessary. It is a culmination of my budding GIS skills with the simple objective of exercising all previously acquired skills through a location suitability analysis. I took on the persona of a GIS analyst for the UWF Working Group, working for a client who needs a suitability analysis to locate a new commercial facility for government contracting based on several criteria. The client is the principle party involved representing the contract company locating a new facility with the following requirements. The facility which needs to be located in one of two counties, Santa Rosa or Okaloosa, Florida. The final selection must balance the following inputs. It must be close to a civilian airfield with greater than 3,000 feet length. It must be located on commercial, industrial, or vacant re-zone-able land. It is preferred that the area have relatively low overall population, and relatively low combined parcel values in the surrounding area. To execute this project the individual criteria were examined from a basic feature class and transformed into a specifically classified raster to allow for multiple weighted analyses to be performed. With all these criteria being combined, and weighted overlays ran, a particular set of parcels were identified within the most suitable areas as being the ones that would be presented to the client for further exploration. The project as a whole can be seen at the following link:

Http://students.uwf.edu/bd26/AppsInGIS/Deus_SR_Ok_Proj.pptx

This was a good cradle to grave style assignment. I was responsible for everything from data acquisition to presentation. After having completed this project I think I would like to explore some other more appropriate factors to the location. The population percentage I used doesnt feel realistic or overly beneficial to the analysis, but I needed the criteria so I used it. The land value does seem like a useful criteria, but the keys with this are definitely land use and proximity to an airfield. Im not sure what better factors I could use, but would investigate further. An additional note, I feel the results Ive presented are mostly functional. However given much more time I would like to bring more Cartographic refinement into the mix. If there were one or two principle deliverable maps over the 8+ map slides in the project I would like to better polish through Corel Draw or other such program. It seems that a time consuming task such as incorporating Corel is one of the first things to go out the window when it comes to deadlines. Overall I think this was a good assignment for further refinement of and building of skills using ArcMAP. Its amazing to look at where I was a few classes ago to the understanding and application I can put into ArcGIS. Thank you.

GIS Programming, The Culmination

Hello and welcome to the final module for the GIS Programming class. This is the essential culmination of everything that has come before. The creation of a script that is then incorporated into a script tool within a custom tool box, and then given supplemental help information and set up for sharing with other GISers. Being able to build and share your own script tools is in my opinion the greatest and longest lasting purpose of integrating python into arcmap. The process time that can be saved by incorporating Python is amazing. And putting all of these tools together and exercising them was the overall objective of this module. Lets look at the result of this weeks tool. Its a random buffer tool which takes an input polygon and generates points at random throughout based on user inputs, and then adds a buffer based on user defined distance. 

Above you can see the Random Buffer Tool dialog box with the user inputs used to generate the random sampling displayed. Additionally you can see the ArcCatalog file structure being employed. Another significant portion of this module was to exercise setting up a standard file structure for ease of reference when sharing tools. 

As this is the last module for the class I will also share some of the key things I have learned looking back, not just what has been shared throughout the courses blogs. 

1. env.overwriteOutput = True    This is one of the most beneficial things that I have used this                 entire time. The ability to modify your script and re-run and have previous results overwritten is         awesome!

2. When in doubt,  shutdown Arcmap, ArcCatalog, close your script and refresh everything, then             try your script again.

3. Spaces, colons (:), quotes ‘””’ really make a difference. 

4. Adding Print messages really is one of the best and quickest trouble shooting methods.

5. Strings, Lists, and Objects, an object can be a list or string, a list can be made a string. 

6. Being able to script tools really is the culmination of the course and one of the best uses of                   Python with ArcMAP

    a. I have a “Cursor Position error” when trying to run several standard ArcMap Tools on my                   personal desktop version of Arcmap, however running the tools/scripts in ArcPy has still been             successful. Understanding how to run the tools in Arcpy has been amazing.

7. Arcpy.GetParameter() and arcpy.GetParameterAsText() are two of the most useful ways to                 correct for hardcoded parameters in a script.

    a. Hardcoding should be a last resort for tool building.

Python Scripting is a huge resource for use within ArcGIS applications. Anyone getting into ArcGIS should have some understanding of the benefits of scripting! 

How big of a bite does Python take? ... Megabytes! 

GIS Programming and Participation #2

Greetings,
    As a part of the second participation assignment I was directed to look for a scientific based article about GIS and share. I took a practical approach to my general search looking for day to day aspects that you may otherwise overlook. I found an amazing result of just another way GIS is making our lives a little better. "GIS is Not a Load of Garbage," but it definitely does help in the realm of waste management and garbage collection. The article linked above is an overview of a process that goes into waste management and collection. Everything from descriptions of the datasets that go into building a solid base map for waste collectors to use, to specific use of Radio Frequency Identification to collect data based on specific site locations and waste capacities. "Solid waste generation rates estimate the amount of waste created by residences, businesses and large events (e.g. severe weather or seismic occurrences) over a certain amount of time," and this data can then in turn be turned into a map to refine waste management techniques employed in a particular area. This is according to the California Department of Resources and Recycling and Recover (CalRecyle), from the article. Apparently refuse management is one thing that California is doing well as the state was recently honored with a GIS Innovation award were "the city of Los Angeles was honored for using GIS to automate route generation and field data collection for garbage trucks," according to this innovation awards article. The science of waste management is being hugely benefited through the integration of GIS. Isnt it amazing to think that something you likely do every week in front of your own home is contributing to this application. Yet another thing that is and can be recorded, categorized, and enhanced through GIS.