Final Project: Bobwhite-Manatee Transmission Line

For the final project, I had to design and perform an analysis of a preferred corridor for the Bobwhite-Manatee Transmission Line. This was a real-world case study that happened around 10-15 years ago. FPL needed to build a line to connect a power station with a substation and had to find a route that had minimal impacts on the community.

I started with designing a cartographic model to describe the problem and criteria, and then lay out the analysis steps, data required, and outputs. From there, I began the analysis. First was using the pairwise intersect tool to figure out which conservation lands and wetlands were in the corridor. Next I created a 400ft buffer around the corridor. I heads up digitized houses based on aerials then used select by location to determine which were in the corridor and which were in the buffer. I also used this tool with the "within" setting to find parcels in the corridor and buffer. The third analysis involved geocoding school locations with a locator I created with Census data, and then determining if any of these were within the corridor or buffer. Finally I measured the corridor.

I realized in the process that I've learned a lot this semester! But I still have a few things to figure out. I stumbled through creating the new feature class and had to reproject it when it was in the wrong projection. I realized at the end that the aerials were in a slightly different variant of Albers Conical Equal Area and had to reproject the rasters. And I spent a lot of time copying and pasting layers to sort out the best way to make different maps with slightly different data. Below are a few of the maps I created. You can also check out the presentation and a transcription.

This map shows all the environmental data - I used the intersect tool to make these layers, and then calculated the geometry of each polygon to find the area for conservation land, uplands, and wetlands.

This map shows the houses and parcels that are within or intersect the corridor. Select by Location and Attribute tools were particularly helpful to find and symbolize this data.

This map shows no schools are within the corridor and it's buffer! I used the Geocoding tool to make all of those dots and feel pretty accomplished to turn cvs data into something spatial.