Kelsey Yoder-Ostroski's Portfolio of Geographic Information Science

Creating Corridors: Multi-Path Suitability Analysis Creative Commons Background Wildlife corridors are a stretch of land where animals migrate from one location to another. They can be as small as a culvert or as wide as entire continents. As humans encroach on habitats, creating and maintaining wildlife corridors are vital to the preservation of animal species. In this hypothetical scenario, we have been asked to propose a wildlife corridor for black bears living in the Coronado National Forest.  Coronado National Forest encompasses a large swath of southern Arizona and New Mexico, consisting of eight "wilderness areas". Animals wishing to travel from one wilderness area to another will encounter human development. We can think of animal movement in terms of cost. Like humans, the bears will want to use as few resources as possible and minimize risk in order to travel.  Objectives For this project, we need to create a corridor. The corridor is the overlapping area between tw

Suitability Analysis: Booleans in Vectors & Rasters An important product of GIS is identifying areas that fit a range of criteria. Where should the local city focus its limited resources? Where can ecologists find a rare species? How do we make the best choice when time and money are on the line?  In GIS, we can attempt to answer these questions with a suitability analysis, which provides a framework for picking "the best" locations for our needs.  Suitability analysis (also called a multicriteria decision analysis) consists of criteria and objectives, the corresponding layers, and a composite of all layers. In other words, there is a problem that needs to be solved, information related to that problem, and a system of making a final result that considers all of the required objectives. So what does that mean in the real world? For the following example, we were asked by wildlife experts to help create a map where mountain lions (cougars) could be located. For this object