Ethan Nauman

GIS 335 Lab 5

5/12/14

 

      For this lab we were able to come up with any question we wanted and then had to project the question onto a map and build a model to show how we created our map. The purpose of this lab was to show the techniques and skills that we had learned over the semester long course. We had to use at least four tools to answer the question and three of them had to be different. For my question I wanted to see all the fires that had taken place in Iron County, WI since the year 2000, that had taken place in the county forests, and were within a 5 mile radius of the major roads in the county. Someone who might use this map to their advantage would be the surrounding area fire departments. By using this map they could come up with alternate routes to get to the fires quickly, or find easier ways to get water to put out the fires.

      This map required data from our WI geo-database along with data from the Wisconsin DNR, all of the metadata I used had already been downloaded onto our arcmap database. However here is the website that would allow you to download DNR metadata if it had not already been available https://www.dnrftp01.wi.gov/geodata/. Upon viewing the data from the DNR on fires I have come up with a concern. I want to know when they plot a point for a fire in the county forest, are they talking about a campfire that went out of control and burned a small area or are they talking about acres that had been burned. I would like to know what is the minimum acreage that has to be burned for the DNR to plot a fire point. This information could potentially change my map or even add fire points to it.

      To portray this map properly I had to use a few different tools. The tools I used to create this map were an erase, a buffer, and 3 different spatial joins. The erase allowed me to show just Iron county while erasing the rest of the counties and the outline of Wisconsin. After the erase I added all the major roads in the county, I eventually wanted to buffer the major roads which would allow me to show a 5 mile radius from the center of the roads. This could help by allowing different routes for the fire  department. For the first of my three spatial joins I joined county forests with Iron county. This would show just the county forests in Iron county. I also joined the major roads with Iron county. This too would also just show the major roads in Iron county. For my final join, I joined the fires with the county forests. This was the most important join since it would show all the fires that occurred in county forests in Iron county. Below is my data model for the map.

      The results of my map allowed me to show exactly what my question had asked. All the fires that had taken place in Iron county since 2000, that were within the county forests, and the fires that were within a 5 mile radius of the major roads in the county. On my map I also left the fires that occurred in county forests but that were not within the 5 mile radius just to show some of the remote areas where these fires had occurred in Iron county.

       My overall impression of this project was that it takes a lot of work to create maps from scratch, and it is sometimes difficult to come up with a sensible question allowing you to project a map of importance for someone or something. If I was asked to repeat the project and change something, I would change the roads section of my map. I would want to find all the roads in Iron county not just the major ones. This could shed more light for a fire department if they were to use this map to get to fires in remote areas. Some of the challenges I faced in creating this map was coming up with a question of relative importance. It was difficult to determine for me exactly what I wanted to project, but once I figured out my question I was able to create the map relatively quick.