Geography 5222: Elements of GIS - Part 1

April - June 2003

Final Project:  

Identifying Priority Conservation Areas in Centre County

click on image to view
 the project report.

Responding to a request to assist with a plan to establish a biological reserve system for Centre County, Pennsylvania, a site selection analysis was performed to identify areas that met all of the following land use and conservation criteria:

• greater than 75 bird and mammalian species combined

• less than 10% of each study area occupied by roads, highways and interstates

• high habitat potential

• publicly owned land

• forested areas

• slope less than 15%

Sets of raster and vector data, and an external attribute table were provided to conduct the site selection analysis.   Data manipulation operations included: converting vector data to raster format, joining attribute tables, populating new fields, performing queries, intersection, and union of shapefiles, dissolving layers, creating hillshade and calculating slope from an elevation grid, buffering roads, calculating areas, reclassifying grid cells to group features, and combining multiple grid themes into a single layer.