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The sites we will be looking for to
accomplish our objective require several important criteria.
Initially, we will obtain relevant shapefiles from the
data library at the Michigan Center for Geographic Information
webpage. The shapefiles we will require are Michigan
LULC, Michigan County boundaries, and Lower Peninsula
watershed boundaries. The Michigan LULC shapefile
will then be classified into categories including urban,
agricultural, wetlands, and other land use classes.
The watershed shapefile will be classified into the
Muskegon River Watershed. We will create a uniform
grid file that will overlay the Muskegon River Watershed,
and then establish distances (in meters) between the
grid points. Also, we will create an
info file of all current permanent, volunteer, and aquatic
site points in the watershed using their coordinates,
which we obtained from one of the project coordinators.
We will buffer around these points for our next step.
We will have a different distance between and
buffer size around the grid points for permanent, volunteer,
and aquatic sites. For permanent sites, the
distance will be 10,000 meters and the buffer will be
1,000 meters. Volunteer distances will be approximately
half of the permanent site distances, with distance
at 5000 meters and buffer of 500 meters. The aquatic
sites will have an even smaller distance at 500 meters,
with a buffer of 100 meters.
We then designated the Muskegon River Watershed into
upper, middle, and lower regions based on the geographic
location of the eleven counties within the watershed.
Within those regions, if possible, we will assign the
same number of sites. First, we will establish all suitable
areas within each region, and then further conclude
final suitable points within the suitable areas (of
each region). To do this, we will mainly be looking
at land use and cover types, as we want an even distribution
of sites on different land use and land cover in each
region. By this we simply mean that in each region,
we ideally want an even distribution of suitable agricultural,
forested, wetland, and urban/built sites.
From this, we hope our results will find points in the
Muskegon River Watershed that are suitable for Permanent,
Volunteer, and Aquatic sites to better serve overall
project goals.
Michigan Center for Geographic Information
http://www.michigan.gov/cgi
Muskegon River Watershed Project
http://envirosonic.cevl.msu.edu |
