MSGIS Portfolio
Yiwei Wang
Suitability Modeling
Potential Optimal Residential Areas in Utah
Introduction: Previously, the approach people choose to determine the place of hospitals, schools, and factories is mostly base on their experiences. However, these methods maybe cannot deal with the complicated situation and scenario. The way people in Utah use to decide the dwelling place differs with that of big cities. ArcGIS is an online integrated platform which help people to design and profile cartography.The purpose of our project was finding the potential optimal places for people to live in Utah. The concept includes
uncertainty in GIS modeling - Fuzzy set theory and suitability modeling. The elements we considered were terrain, environment, and transportation. Figure.1 is the work flow of the project.
Method and Result: As a good area to live, the first element we considered was environment. The good place should close to hospitals, schools, parks, etc. It should far away from industries, landfills, and so on. The second element we considered was slope. The slope should not too steep to build housing. The third element was transportation. The good place should close to road and highway, as well as public transit. From our final map, most of Salt Lake County, Davis County, Utah County, Morgan County, Weber County, and Cache County were included. And a part of Box Elder County, Rich County, Tooele County, Juba County, Sanpete County, Wasatch County and Summit County were also in the result map. Figure.2 shows the potential optimal residential areas in Salt Lake County.
Skills(GIS Analysis, Model Building, Cartography and Graphic Design, Spatial Analysis): There were many GIS analysis skills used in this project, use "euclidean distance" to calculate the distance from closest source for each element, use "reclassify" to get the rank of value, use "weighted overlay" to combine all the elements together, and use "con" to get the best value, this value was the result of the project. For the element slope, we identified it from Utah digital elevation model by using "slope" tool, and did the same analysis as other elements. Model builder also be used to perform GIS operations and spatial analysis, it could shows the process through the whole project. The final results were maps with the optimal areas.
View the paper
Figure.1
Figure.2