Mapping the Downloaded Data for the Sand Mining Suitability Project

Exercise 5: Mapping the Downloaded Data for the Sand Mining Suitability Project

Goals and Objectives: The goal of exercise 5 was to become more familiar with downloading data from different sources on the internet, importing the data to ArcGIS, joining data, projecting data from these different sources into one coordinate system. The final task was to build and design a geodatabase to store the data.

General Methods: The first part of this exercise consisted of downloading data about Trempealeau county from the internet. Before any downloading began, a temporary file had to be set up in the temp folder because some of the data takes up a lot of computer space. From the temp folder, I extracted the data into a working folder. All of the data for this exercise were gathered off of the internet. The sources and the data taken from that website are listed below.

Sources and Data Downloaded:

• US Department of Transportation-- Railroads
• USGS-- Digital Elevation Model
• USDA-- Land Use and Land Cover
• USDA NRCS Soil Survey-- Soil Information
• Trempealeau County Land Records-- Trempealeau County Geodatabase

After all of the data was downloaded and in the correct folders and the geodatabase was organized, the Python Script was written. A screen shot of that script can be seen in my blog titled "Python Script". From the Python Script in post two the following maps were created:

Figure 1: Cropland Data for Trempealeau County

Figure 2: Land Cover Data for Trempealeau County

Figure 3: Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for Trempealeau County

Data Accuracy:

By looking at the metadata for the data downloaded, it shows information about the actual data gathered. It also shows how accurate and reliable the data is. This is helpful to know about any limitations or coordinate system projections for the future. Below is a list of the data gathered. For each data set, we had to find the scale, effective resolution, minimum mapping unit, planimetric coordinate accuracy, lineage, temporal accuracy and attribute accuracy. If there was no information for a category, it is denoted with N/A.

Conclusion: The ability to download free data off of the website from credible sources is a great skill to have. Most of the data that will be needed to complete this project has now been downloaded. It is all stored in a geodatabase specifically for this project. Although the downloading of data can be frustrating, it is good practice. I am very interest and curious to see what the final results show about the suitability of frack sand mining in Trempealeau County.

Websites:

USDOT:  http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_atlas_database/index.html
USGS: http://nationalmap.gov/about.html
USDA: http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/
USDA NRCS Soil Survery: http://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm
Trempealeau County Geodatabase: http://www.tremplocounty.com/tchome/landrecords/