Module 6: Suitability Analysis

 

For this week's lab we explored suitability analysis, and took an in depth look at the ways data can be derived and used for determining the suitability of certain areas and habitats for conservation and development. In the above pictured raster, set, we first took 2 preexisting rasters, one for land cover and one for slope, and used the reclassify function to create a Boolean raster that displays suitability as either a 1 or a 0. We then took the roads and rivers features on the map and created a Euclidean distance buffer around both features and reclassified these 2500 buffers on a 0 or 1 determined by suitability. Finally, we used the raster calculator function to add up the rasters and determine which areas of the dataset satisfied the most values for the suitability analysis. Pictured above is a raster calculator performed for equal weighted values, and with specific weight so that certain categories received more weight when calculating suitability.