Site Suitability

Scenario: Monroe County has funds to build a new fire station. A planning meeting was held to identify the most important criteria for siting the new fires station. They include (but are not limited to):

Distance to Floodplain (negative)
Distance to Major Road (postive) (Class = PA or FW)
Distance to Existing Fire Stations (negative) - includes county and city
Zoned for use other than Federal Reserve

You are a GIS Analyst for the County and have been given the task to identify suitable (optimal?) locations for the new fire station. In the course of your work, you are approached by two government officials. One that advocates locating the fire station close to the north part of the county, another advocating building the fire station in the southeast part of the county. Produce two weighted overlay products, one with a solution in the north part of the county and another with a solution in the southeast part of the county. You may add additional criteria if you wish, but you must at least use the above three criteria (dist2floodplain, dist2majroad, dist2fire_station).

Tools:

Spatial Analyst : Distance : Straight Line

ArcToolbox : Spatial Analyst : Overlay : Weighted Overlay

Raster Calculator : Int function

Spatial Analyst : Reclassify

Notes:

While distances for these kinds of analyses are usually performed using network analysis, we'll rely on the raster Euclidean distance functions for this lab to simplify the processing.

Read the Weighted Overlay documentation to address the float vs. integer issue with input layers

See Suitability_Lab.zip (Resources on Oncourse) for data

Questions:

1) (10 points) List the weights you used to produce the two solutions (North, SE)

2) (15 points) What resolution did you choose for the distance surfaces? Explain why you chose that resolution.

3) (20 points) Take the weights for the North solution from Question 1. Rerun the weighted overlay analysis at 100 m and 500 m resolution (i.e. resample all input datasets to those resolutions). Describe how the results are different and why.

4) (15 points) Make a flow chart representing the steps you followed to get your solutions (i.e. all the analysis to get the suitable location, including the zoning restriction).

5) (20 points) Discuss the subjectivity and error involved with your analysis. Address how you are able to arrive at different answers by a) using data with different representations (i.e. resolution, scale, completeness) and b) by modifying the criteria weights.

Maps:

(5 points) - A map of the optimal locations for North and SE solutions (symbolize differently)

(5 points) - Map of distance to Fire Stations

(5 points) - Map of distance to Floodplain

(5 points) - Map corresponding to question #3 (500 m version)