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Dr. Carroll
GEOG 481
Final GIS Project
For my final project, I chose something that would be useful for my undergraduate thesis.
My thesis involves collecting samples from the Salinas River Mud Belt in Monterey Bay
California and sampling them to find sedimentation rates, the size of sediment grains, and
sediment provenance. The main contributor of sediment to the continental shelf that Ill be
studying, is the Salinas River. Since it will be one of the main focuses of the project I wanted to
download a world base map, the rivers of California, the Salinas River watershed shape, and
California dams. After adding all the layers to my data frame, I exported all my data as new
layers for other maps later on. Since I only wanted to know what was going on inside the
watershed I clipped the rivers with the watershed layer. The dams were a bit trickier, as I could
not clip them, I had to select by location the dams within the watershed then go into the attribute
table a figure the names of the dams on the actual river and its tributaries to make a query with
containing information on
particularly interested in
system would produce. The land use shape had data located outside of the watershed, and only in
the northern half, so using the clipping tool I produce a new layer showing only land use inside
the watershed. Then I opened the symbology tab of the land use to distinguish the categories of
land being used, by customizing the symbols to give it a more appropriate farmland scheme. I
found that the land along the river was all prime farmland. Unfortunately, its very hard to find
any data on where drip irrigation occurs within the valley, so this was the best I could do.
The fires maps are where it became more interesting. When a fire occurs, it burns
vegetation with the area, and when there is no vegetation to hold onto the soil, rain can come in
tab to break the fires into quantities. I wanted to group them by decade because there were too
many to categorize them each on their own, but it didnt work. With a little help from Dr. Carroll
I figured out why I could not use the fire year to separate the fires by decade. It was because the
fires were in a text field rather than a numerical field. So I created a new field and transferred the
fire years into a numerical field and then easily separated them in the symbology tab. After
completing this part, I then decided I wanted to know what percent of the watershed burned each
Next, I wanted to know what fires would be irrelevant to my study due to dam
installation. For the next three maps I used the same process for all of them. I made a query for
the rivers and dams I wanted to show. Then I selected by location the sub watersheds that flowed
into the river and made a query for those. Next, I add the fire data and clipped it to show only the
fires within the selected watersheds. Lastly, I made a second map to query the data to show only
the fires before dam installation to produce the three maps below.
Map shows fires
within
watersheds that
empty into the
San Antonio
river. The left
map shows all
fires within the
sub watersheds
from 1912-2007.
Map to the right
shows fires
within the sub
watersheds
before the dam
was installed in
1965.
After creating all three of these maps, I realized that some of the same areas had been
burned at different time periods. Also, about half of the fires all three maps had happened before
dam installation. Maybe for a further research on this project I can make more maps
distinguishing what other areas also have been burned more than once.
Through this project, I learned that data can come to you funky and needs correcting. I
learned that I can use GIS confidently; I could do all of the basic function like adding data,
changing symbology, adding labels, performing queries and clips, all without having to refer to
previous project. I also learned that there are many was to manipulate the things that you want
but that there are some more efficient ways than others. I feel I have gained a skill that is useful
for further work on my thesis project, and hopefully in the future for a job.