Vector 2 - Week 10 Lab

This week we used buffers and overlays to highlight areas on the map within specific parameters. The purpose of my map was to specify ideal campsites. Using the afformentioned tools I was able to narrow down areas within 300 meters of a road, within 150 meters of a lake, within 500 meters of a river, and outside of conservation areas. 

While the appropriate overlay methods were pretty obvious for this lab, I feel comfortable with the others as well. The only problems I ran into were with ArcPy. I created the first layer with no problems, but using Shift+Enter and copy/paste did not work for me. Pressing enter after I had my information input correct would only make another line with "..." as the indention. It was necessary to clear the field contents and create each layer individually. 


My process summary for future reference: 


Step 5: The Union
1.     First, I separated the features that were inside or outside the water buffer by assigning a “1” to the areas inside with the field calculator
2.     I repeated this process with features inside the Roads_Buff300m layer and added the Buffdist field
3.     I used the Union tool to create a layer that was a union of the Water_Buffer and Roads_Buff300m layers called Buffers_Union. This created a layer with nine records. I realized that there were null fields so I went back to the Roads_Buff300m layer and added 300 to the Buffdist field. I was not sure if I was supposed to do this initially.
4.     Next, I examined different possible results in the attribute table
5.     I created a new feature class with records that only had features inside the buffer layer called buffer_union_export and added the new layer to my map
6.     Finally, I tested the “Update” tool to see how it compared to the “Union” tool. I realized that it did not show separation between the feature classes and instead combined them visually.




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