March 12, 2001
Research Project 8
Identifying Priority Conservation Areas in Centre County
Project Overview:
The Pennsylvania, Centre County Planning Office determined that it was necessary to Identify priority conservation areas for certain endangered species. As a result, the following research project was developed. The purpose of the project was to initiate a proposal for a biological reserve system within the perimeter of Centre County. This system would have the potential of protecting lands that are unique in terms of the number of different species and habitat quality. A non-profit consulting group was chosen to accomplish these goals.
Researchers at the local university have agreed to provide the consulting group with the five electronic data layers. The data are needed to perform a site selection analysis, and include the following tables:
The Centre County planning office established certain criteria for the project which include presentations that focus on the following:
Study sites that have greater than 75 bird and mammalian species combined.
Study sites that have less than 10% of their area occupied by roads, highways and interstates.
Land that is considered to have high habitat potential.
The results of the analysis will be used to create maps displaying the locations of the candidate reserve sites within the county.
Figure 1, Potential Biological Reserve Sites (Specie Sites)
Figure 2, Buffered Roads within Specie Sites
Figure 3, Buffered Roads, Highways and Interstate
Figure 4: Road Lands Related to Study Sites
Figures 5 & 6: Study Sites with Non-Roads
Figure 7: Study Sites Having less than 10% of Area Occupied by Roads, Highways and Interstates
Figure 8: Candidate Reserve Sites
Map Layout 1: Land Ownership Overlay of Candidate Reserve Sites
Map Layout 2: Digital Elevation Model Overlay of Candidate Reserve Sites
Figure 1, Potential Biological Reserve Sites (Specie Sites)
This view was achieved by joining the Specie Richness theme with the Study Sites theme, and then saving the results as a new theme called Specie Sites. A new attribute field was added to accommodate the sum of the Birds and Mammals fields. The attribute field is entitled Specie Site. Query builder was deployed to find >75 species sites. A second attribute field was added and named AreaSqmi by calculating the Area field * 0.000000386103. The purpose of this was to convert square meters to square miles.
Figure 2, Buffered Roads within Specie Sites
Roads, highways and interstates were reduced from a county wide database to roughly the road surfaces featured within the Specie Sites study area. This view shows that the roads corridor width has been increased to 20 meters, highways to 50 meters, and interstates to 100 meters. These expanded areas represent buffer zones which will be part of the road system used to calculate the biological reserve habitat. A new feature class called Buffzone was added to the project view which includes all of the buffered roads domain.
Figure 3, Buffered Roads, Highways and Interstate
This scene features a 1:100,000 scale observation of the overall expanded roads corridor after the buffering process. The view was produced earlier using a different color scheme.
Figure 4: Road Lands Related to Study Sites
This image shows the results of a union between two feature classes. The input theme was designated as Buffzone and the Specie Sites polygon theme was used as the overlay feature. The roads domain in relation to the study sites was the outcome of this union.
Figures 5 & 6: Study Sites with Non-Roads
A new feature class called Allzerros was added to the project view. This new feature class shows the non-road portion of the study sites. The lower image was added at scale 1:100,000 to distinguish the concept of non-road study sites in relation to other study sites. This view is in contrast to the view shown in figure 3.
Figure 7: Study Sites Having less than 10% of Area Occupied by Roads, Highways and Interstates
To achieve this view, three new fields were added to the Allzerros feature class. The CalcGeom script and calculator feature was implemented to determine the study sites with less than 10% road coverage. Titles of these new fields are: (1) TotArea which equals the Area field * 0.000000386103 (updated with the CalcGeom script), (2) RoadArea which is the area remaining after the TotArea is subtracted, and (3) the %RdArea which equals the RoadArea divided by AreaSqmi * 100. The resulting feature class was named Less10%. The light green overlay represents unqualified study sites.
Figure 8: Candidate Reserve Sites
The affects of a query for the high habitat potential resulted in a new feature class named Habitalpo. A spatial intersection was performed between the Allzerros feature class and overlapping areas of the Habitalpo feature class. The theme created from the spatial intersection was named HabPop10% which is shown in the dark green elements above.
Map Layout 1: Land Ownership Overlay of Candidate Reserve Sites
The thematic overlay features the boundaries of the property owners in relation to the potential biological habitat sites. The image was produced by creating two new themes by querying the ownership shape file. As shown in figure 9, the property owners are both public and private.
Map Layout 2: Digital Elevation Model Overlay of Candidate Reserve Sites
The reclassification of hillshade of elevation reflects two possible heights in a raster grid format. The candidate reserve sites are shown as an overlay, and are entitled High Habitat Potential. The raster grid originally contained several elevation altitudes. For simplification purposes, the multiple elevations were reclassified into two elevations. Elevation one designates land in lower altitudes from 0 to 180 meters, while elevation two shows the elevation range from 181 to 254 meters.
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