GIS Final Project

The very last assignment for Intro to GIS was an assessment of the Bobwhite-Manatee Transmission Line, which was constructed several years ago in Manatee and Sarasota Counties in southwest Florida. The object of the final project was to take the preferred corridor for the transmission line and analyze its impact on the environment and communities to determine whether it met the criteria its placement was supposedly based on.

The criteria assessed for this assignment were selected from a list used in the real-life planning of the transmission line. They were:

Does the preferred corridor avoid large areas of environmentally sensitive land? (Conservation lands and wetlands were analyzed for this project.)
Does the preferred corridor avoid homes? (This analysis involved digitizing possible houses from aerial imagery, as well as calculating the number of land parcels impacted.)
Does the preferred corridor avoid schools/daycares?
And is the preferred corridor feasible in terms of length and cost?

All analysis was performed in ArcMap. Analysis of each of the first three criteria primarily used either the Clip tool (with the preferred corridor as the clip shape) or a Select By Location query to identify impacted features. For the second and third criteria, a 400 foot buffer around the preferred corridor was created in ArcMap in order to include features in proximity to the transmission line as well as those directly impacted by the corridor. Length and cost were calculated based on the estimated centerline of the corridor, using ArcMap's measurement tool and a provided equation, respectively.

For more details and results (not to mention the maps), my final presentation and write-up are available online:
PowerPoint
Presentation Transcript

The short version: The transmission line is an estimated 25 miles long and impacts a fairly minimal amount of sensitive land, a relatively low number of homes and parcels, and no schools or daycares. In other words, it basically does a good job of fulfilling the criteria.