Corridor Analysis

In this analysis, we had to create a model to suggest an area for a wildlife corridor for black bears in between two NPS parcels. We had to consider the landcover, elevation, and distance to roads as criteria for where the bears would most likely want to go. 

I prepare the road map by converting it to a raster using the Euclidean Distance Tool. Then I used the reclassify tool for all three data sets (roads, land cover and elevation) as per the guidance provided in the lab instructions. Next I added all three of these layers to the Weighted Overlay tool, set the scale from 1-10, and weight the layers as follows: 60% land cover, 20% roads, 20% elevation. I used the Reclassify tool to create a cost surface by changing the values to reflect the suitability of each cell. I calculated each value by subtracting it from 10. Then I ran the Cost Distance tool twice, using the previously created cost surface layer with Coronado1 and then Coronado2 as the source. Finally, I ran the Corridor tool using the two Cost Distance files. 

To create the final product, I had to examine the corridor and change symbology to reflect a reasonably-sized corridor so it didn't include the entire landmass between the two parks. This took a bit of trial and error. In the end, I used the suggested categories from earlier in the lab to create the corridors.