Project 4 Forestry Report Week

This week we were to create a poster that portrays our stand or viewpoint on the practice of Clear-cut forestry.  Although clear-cut forestry has in the past had a adverse impact on our environment, I believe that using the latest management practices, which are based on experience and science, that a balance can be struck between clear-cut forestry operations and the environment.

Project 4 Analyze Week

How the Public Perceives Forestry (and Why It Matters)

As the title indicates, this article discusses how the public perceives forestry operations and why these perceptions matter.  Although this article is written about the Northwest United States, I believe it is relevant worldwide.    The article states that, of the people interviewed, nearly 70% were opposed to the practice of clear cutting, based largely on aesthetics.  However, when provided with information that educated them on issues such as future land use and the science that is now applied to most clear cutting operation, they were much less likely to be opposed.  One caveat to providing this information was to ensure that the information provided was factual, based on scientific research, and understood by those who received it.  It was also important to tailor the information to the audience, in other words, address the issues pertinent to that particular region.  In the cases that this was achieved, the idea that clear cut forestry operations were a valuable tool to aid land managers in providing a sustainable resource and still have the best interest of the environment in mind was much better received.  

 

Citations:

Ecological

1^st Article: Greenberg, Cathryn H., Harris, Lawrence D., Neary Daniel G. 1995. “A Comparison of Bird Communities in Burned and Salvage-Logged, Clearcut, and Forested Florida Sand Pine Scrub.” The Wilson Bulletin 107, no 1:40-54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4163511

 

Economic

1^st Article: Hahn, W.A. and Knoke, Thomas 2010. Sustainable development and sustainable forestry: analogies, differences, and the role of flexibility. European Journal of Forestry 129:787-801.

 

Aesthetic

1^st Article: Murray, Sarah, and Peter Nelson. How the Public Perceives Forestry (and Why It Matters). lecture., University of Washington, 2005. https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks.

Module 10 Supervised Classifiction

Project 4 Prepare week

For prepare week of Project 4 I was required  to locate clear cut areas that were visiable from roads that run throughout the area.  The study area was a  1400 ha “woodlot” located in New Brunswick, Canada. The first step in the analysis was to identify recent clearcuts adjacent to the main roads.  After adding the “cover” feature class to my workspace, I selected the main roads by selecting by attribute the cover type “RD”.   Next I did a select by location query to find the cover types that were adjacent to, or intersect my main road selections. Once this was complete I isolated the clearcuts and treed bogs from the selection by doing a select from current selection “all treed bogs and stands with an age of greater than or equal to “0” years and less than or equal to 5 years”. This left me with 43 clearcuts visible from main roads.  I then opened the attribute table calculated the statistics for the “shape_area” field to determine that the total area of clearcuts adjacent to the main roads occupied approximately 121 ha. 

Next I needed to identify boundaries shared by main roads and clearcuts.  To start this process I opened the “feature class to feature class tool.  I named the output “cover_arcs” set the coordinate system to the appropriate projection, and made all other entries, and ran the tool. I then joined the coverage PAT to the cover_arcs AAT using “COVER# and LPOLY as identifiers. Once this was complete I did a select by attribute from cover_arcs to isolate arcs with recent clearcuts on the left using the expression provided in the lab sheet.  I added a new field in the attribute table “LeftPoly” and assigned it a value of “CC” with the field calculator.  I then repeated these steps for the clearcuts on the right. I then removed the join.  I then did a select by attribute to calculate the total length of boundaries shared by young clearcuts and main roads.  This turned out to be 44 arcs with a length of nearly 8 kilometers (7.74).  To see how many, if any of the clearcuts were adjacent to each other I used the Dissolve tool. Once this tool was ran, it indicated that one area was nearly a kilometer long.

To calculate the viewshed for all roads I opened the “clines” feature class in Arcmap.  I then removed the sewer line and power line easements using the “definition query” and renamed the layer “Main Roads”.  Using the Merge tool I combined Main Roads with proads named the new feature class “RoadViewers”.  I then added the elevation raster as a layer.  I used the “feature to raster” tool to add stand heights from the cover layer to the elevation layer. I named the output “HeightClasses”.  To fix a band of “no data” I merged the publicrow with the cover layer and then computed a new “HeightClasses” raster.  Using the Raster Calculator and the elevation raster, and HeightClass layer I created a viewing surface, named oddly enough “ViewingSurface”.  Using the viewshed tool and the RoadViewers feature as the observer and ViewingSurface as the viewing surface I created a new layer named “Viewshed”. 

To determine the amount of visible clearcut I used the definition query to isolate young clearcuts in the cover layer, and renamed the layer “RecentClearcuts”. This operation selected 121 stands.  I then used the “feature to Raster” tool to convert “recentClearcuts” to a 10 m cell-sized raster and named the output “Clearcuts”.  To calculate where both “Clearcuts” and “Viewshed” exist I used the Raster calculator with “Clearcut” & “Viewshed” as input and named the output “VisibleClearcuts”.  The map above is a base map that depicts the study area I will be using for the entire project.

Module 9 Unsupervised Classification

For this week in Remote Sensing we explored unsupervised classification of features, using both ArcMap and ERDAS.  The map above depicts five separate feature classifications.  To create this map we first took a provided image and created another image with 50 classifications.  Once this was complete, we then reclassified the image into just five classifications; this was all done in ERDAS.  To make the final map I used ArcMap and added all the map essentials.

Web Applications - Report Week

For the third and final portion of "Web Applications" we were to refine our web maps from last week.  For this I changed my subtitle to "Where I spend My Time and Money in Okaloosa County", I also changed my first tour point from an introduction to an actual point on the tour (probably should have done this in the first place), I then changed the layout parameter from the default of "three-panel" to "integrated" just like the look of the integrated layout better, and finally I changed the zoom layer parameter from the default of "-1" to "19" this lets the viewer see a close up of each point of the tour by simply clicking on that point. Like I mentioned last week my tour is not real flashy but I am happy with the results, hope you enjoy!

Below is a link to my final map:

http://students.uwf.edu/prc7/GIS4930/Module3/index.html

Project 3: Web Applications - Analyze Week

During Analyze week of Module 3, Topics in GIS, we created story maps. My story map depicts ten locations in Okaloosa County, Florida where I spend my time and money!  For the project, we were provided with basically everything we would require; we just had to update it with our information.  I first found or took photos of my locations of interest, and then using a picture editor resized the photos for use in the map.  I then found the coordinates to the locations and converted them to decimal degrees, and wrote a brief description of each location. Once this was done I updated the .csv file that was provided.  Done with the .csv file I created a web map in ArcGIS online, and added my points to the map along with a supporting layer.  Then I “pointed” my map template, which was provided, to the map I had just created in ArcGIS online, and added the UWF logo.  After this was complete I tested my link to ensure my map worked, much to my surprise it did!  This week took me way out of my comfort zone, the lab handout provided helped, but the “Read Me” file provided was a life saver!  Below is a link to my map it is not real flashy but it has been a rough week. Hope you enjoy.

http://students.uwf.edu/prc7/GIS4930/Module3/index.html