Labs 4 & 5: Mini-Final Project

Introduction:

The research question that I chose to answer is "Where is the best place to live in Rusk county, Wisconsin?" Seeing as this question is very dependent on an individual's own personal opinion of what "the best place to live" means, I will be using my own preference to set the parameters of the project. 

I grew up in the woods of northern Minnesota, so I would like to live within walking/biking distance or a rather short driving distance of a forest, preferably a national forest or a county forest. However, I found after some research that Rusk county does not have any national forests so it will have to be in proximity with a county forest.

I also grew up on a lake that we could easily get to on foot, so I would like to live near a body of water. Since there are not as many lakes in Wisconsin (or at least in Rusk county) as there are in Minnesota, I will make it within ten miles of a lake, that way it would be either a short drive in a car or a reasonable bike ride away.

The county seat is the city of Ladysmith, Wisconsin, which is located almost exactly in the center of Rusk county. I would like to be near to the town while not residing in it; close enough that a grocery store trip is not a long time to drive for (I am used to driving at least a half hour to get to a grocery store because of the remote place I am from - Max, MN). I also want to be near Ladysmith because the Flambeau mine is located there. I have been doing research on the Flambeau VMS deposit and originally chose Rusk county to become more familiar with the area. So, between ten and twenty miles of Ladysmith would be ideal.

In summary, for the purposes of my project, the best place to live in Rusk county, Wisconsin would be:

• within 6 miles of a county forest
• within 10 miles of a lake
• between ten and twenty miles of the city of Ladysmith, WI

Data Sources:

The cities and Wisconsin state boundary data came from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire Geography departmental server where a map service has been published for the   2013 ESRI U.S. Census data. The county, lakes, county forests, roads data came from the Wisconsin DNR 2014 database. 

I would have liked the lakes feature class to include all the lakes and the lakes in the county - with the basemap I can see that there are some lakes are not included in the data.  I would have also liked reservoirs, such as the Dairyland reservoir, which is along the Flambeau River and can also be seen in the basemap, to be included either in with the lakes feature class or as a separate shapefile. Including these would have changed the region called Best Area on the map.

For cartographic aesthetics I would like if the town of Conrath was not without any roads going to it; it looks so isolated. However, the shapefile only has major roads, so since Rusk county is small and rural it makes sense that many roads would not be considered major roads.

Methods:

Since I only am working with Rusk county, after putting the datasets into ArcMAP, I used the clip tool to make everything only as big as the Rusk county boundary. I then set to work creating the data flow model, which I had previously sketched out on paper, using the model builder feature (Figure 1). 

Figure 1

I used the Select tool to choose one town from the towns (clipped from cities) feature class: Ladysmith. Then I executed two buffers on the selection to get two different sized circular areas around the town of Ladysmith. I only wanted the area between ten and twenty miles of Ladysmith, not the part within ten miles, so I used the Erase tool to get rid of the ten mile radius around the town. I was then left with a donut-shaped region with Ladysmith at the center. The county forests feature class only needed a buffer, as did the lakes feature class, six miles and ten miles respectively. The Intersect tool was used to get the area that all three areas overlapped, and finding that a corner of the Good Criteria area was outside of the county boundary, I used the Clip tool to make everything only within the area of interest, Rusk county.

Results:

Figure 2

The final product from the previously stated process is an area that is between ten and twenty miles of Ladysmith, Wisconsin, within six miles of a county forest, and within ten miles of a lake, which is represented on the map in Figure 2 as the purple crosshatched regions. In my opinion, the best place to live in Rusk county, Wisconsin would be inside this area. 

Evaluation:

This project was enjoyable in the aspects where I was able to design my own investigation and understand the process of finding out the desired result. However, I did come across a bit of a problem when I was doing the analysis. While running the tools in the model builder, things were going as expected, but then all of a sudden, no tool would work anymore. I would get an error every time I tried to do something and these errors did not make sense. It was a long and confusing extent of work time that followed, as I changed things in the data workflow model, and the analysis process, and even in my project's parameters in order to get around the unknown problem. I created several different models and maps but they all ended in errors from tools not being able to be run. I would like to say thank you to Mattheus, and Scott, for kindly helping out and teaching me new ways to do things in ArcMAP, even though nothing worked and we were still confused. In the end, the problem turned out to be a simple one. When creating a new geodatabase for the project, not knowing the difference I had selected a personal geodatabase instead of a file geodatabase. The restrictions on the personal geodatabase would not allow any other tools to be run which is why I was getting an error every time. It was a simple fix after a lot of searching for a solution and I was back on my way. I now understand the importance of making sure I create the right kind of geodatabase, and I will not be likely to make the same mistake again. 

In addition to making the personal geodatabase a file geodatabase right away, I would make the change of including all of the lake-like bodies of water in the lakes feature class, as discussed in the Data Sources section.

This project was a great learning experience, and I now feel like I am able to navigate, use, and understand ArcMAP and ArcGIS.