Name: ___________________________________

Date: ___________________________________

GIS Appreciation Exercise

Doing GIS without GIS
You are a professional consultant and your client, Wildcat Boat Company, is planning to
construct a small office building and testing facility to evaluate new designs. Theyve narrowed
the proposed site to a farming area near a large lake and several small towns. The company now
needs to select a specific site that meets the following requirements:

The site should not have trees (to reduce costs of clearing land and prevent the
unnecessary destruction of trees). A regional agricultural preservation plan prohibits
conversion of farmland. The other categories (urban, barren, and wetlands) are also out.
So, the land cover must be brush land.

The building must reside on soils suitable for construction.

A local ordinance designed to prevent rampant development allows new construction

only within 300 meters of existing sewer lines.

Water-quality legislation requires that no construction occur within 20 meters of

streams.

The site must be a least 4000 square meters to provide space for the building and
grounds.

Figure 1 is a key to the project maps. It shows the symbols for land cover, soil suitability,
streams, and sewers. These maps are also available as digital images on D2L for your
convenience.

GEOG 3500: GIS APPRECIATION EXERCISE

Figure 1. Key to maps of the Wildcat Boat Facility area.

Figure 2 is a map showing landcover in the area from which the site will be chosen. Different
crosshatch symbols indicate different types of land cover; the white area in the northern part of
the map is water. The land cover codes (LC CODES) and categories (LC TYPES) are as follows:
LC CODE
100
200
300
400

LC TYPE
Urban
Agriculture
Brush land
Forest

LC CODE
500
600
700

LC TYPE
Water
Wetlands
Barren

GEOG 3500: GIS APPRECIATION EXERCISE

Figure 2. Landcover. Different crosshatch symbols indicate different types of land cover;
the white area in the northern part of the map is water. The land cover codes and
categories are given in the table on the previous page.

GEOG 3500: GIS APPRECIATION EXERCISE

Figure 3. Soil Suitability. Lines separate soils of different types. The different soils are
categorized as suitable or unsuitable for building. Therefore, you will see the same
symbol on both sides of a dividing line, indicating that, while such soil types may be
different, their suitability is the same.

GEOG 3500: GIS APPRECIATION EXERCISE

Figure 4. Streams and Sewers. This map shows streams (narrow lines) and sewers
(broader lines).

GEOG 3500: GIS APPRECIATION EXERCISE

Instructions and Deliverables

You may use scissors, photocopies, a computer-based drawing program, a light table, and any
other tools to solve this problem.
Your solution should be a map that shows ALL the areas where the company could build (areas
that meet ALL requirements stated on page 1). Make your map the same scale and size as those
provided here and on D2L (they are jpeg images shown at 100% scale in this document). Outline
in RED all the areas that meet the requirements. You do not need to produce a high quality
cartographic product. The main objective here is to analyze geographic data. That is what we
will do all semester using state-of-the art GIS software. But first, you need to do this manually so
that you can appreciate the sophisticated software.
Write a brief description (100-200 words) of the procedure you used to make the map. Print this
out and turn in with your final map.
The problem is much easier than it might otherwise be because the maps provided cover exactly
the same area, have the same underlying assumptions regarding the shape and size of Earth, are
at the same scale, and use the same projection of the Earths sphere onto the flat plan of the
map. These benefits are often not available in the real world, where you frequently need a
considerable amount of data preparation to solve such a problem. ArcGIS software has many
tools to aide in lining up geographic data.

GEOG 3500: GIS APPRECIATION EXERCISE