Methodology

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I have used a reversed thinking to manipulate this analysis.

#1 In the first place, I need to make a map showing the classification of the land use for the mountain, to make it visualized, it is a good way to overlay Hillshade and the landuse layers together. To make a hillshade, we need to create DEM; to create a DEM, we need to create TIN!
In this case, I used contours to create TIN.I put it into Arcscene and this classification step is regarded as a brief introduction and a general understanding of the exploring area.




Final Map

#2 This is the first analysis of the area concerning birds.

As we can see, this is a discrete distribution of birds, in order to make an analysis of density, I treated the range of activity of the birds centering on the sampling points as Thiessen Polygons. Based on raster analysis, I used Euclidean Allocation to create the range. According to the data, the largest range of activity is 500meters, so creating a buffer is necessary. Here comes to the projected range.


Opening the attribute table, there are 30 polygons(30 points). In the count field, we may think each polygon as a zone, in which the birds living. Therefore, the counts are the numbers of birds live in this area. To do the density analysis, I created a population field as a parameter in the statistic. As we can see in the formula, it is a ratio between the actual birds' activity range and the predected largest range. It will be thought as the weighted value for the calculation of density analysis.

Population = [30*30*count] / [500*500*3.1416]

Final Map

#3 This is the second analysis of the area concerning forest range.

Multi-Criteria Analysis:

The potential area prefers low slope which ranges from 0 to 20 degrees; Aspect should range from 112 to 248 and the land use type must be forest. In addition, it's better that the area intersects with roads and whose area between 200000 and 300000 square meters.
Based on the criteria, I chose Binary number to reclassify the Slope and Aspect. Because forest is the only land use, this kind of methods are considered as capability filters. As a result, we got a layer with two values:1-Capable area; 0-Incapable area.

In detail, both for Slope and Aspect, I used reclassify tool to make the value to be 1 with the range needed and 0 for the rest range. This is re-classified map. 

Final Map

Befor manipulating the second process-suitability, I've done the Majority Filter.Majority Filter tools are used to generalize the edges of zones in a raster. The edges are smoothed to varying degrees either by expanding and shrinking boundaries or by growing or shrinking zones based on the values within the neighborhood of individual locations.

In terms of the suitability, based on the requirements, I need select the location and arrtibute of the area, so it is convenient to analyze in vector. Hence I made raster to polygon. Now we can step into the suitability analysis.

                 TO                                             TO                     

                                                                 Select by location                          Select by arrtibute          Final Map

                          (Intersect with roads)                       (200000<Area<300000)                                                                                                             

#4 This is the last part analysis of the area concerning shortest path from forest range to wood-working factory.


The objective is to build a road from forest range to wood-working factory.

Building Cost surface:

There are two factors considered that influence the construction of the route. One is the slope and the other is land type. In the first palce, I reclassified the two factors to set the suitable cost value on each. Then I put the same weighted value on the factors to calculate the cost surface.

Cost surface reflects the sum cost value for building the road. As we  know, the  higher the value, the more it costs.

Having building the cost surface we can calculate the cost distance then.

Cost distance are similar to cost surface, the  higher the value, the more it costs.

Here comes to the projected cost path.


Final Map

Once the route has been built, it is important to observe the feature again to make it more practical and make sure its operability. In this case,

I created a profile graph of the terrain to show the changes of elevation.

As we can see in the graph, from the forest range to the plant, the elevation decreases as the roads extends.

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