Suitability Model of Sand Mines

Goals and Objectives

For the last part of our sand mine project we built a suitability model using various raster geoprocessing tools to place sand mines in the most ideal place in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin.With this model people will be able to look at a map and easily tell where the best placement of a sand mine would be based on geology, land cover, distance to railroads, slope and a water table.

Methods

Creating a suitability model based on the following five criteria

1. Geology
2. Land Use/Land Cover
3. Distance to railroads
4. Slope
5. Water Table

Figure 1: Ranking of the five criteria for creating a suitability Model. The higher the ranking the more suitable for a sand mine.

Figure 2: Model Builder of the tools and steps I took to get to the final suitability model

Many more tools were actually run than shown in the above model maker. For example the water table had to be downloaded from a website and was originally a coverage file. This had to be converted to a raster using the tool "import from e00."

Figure 3: All Maps showing each individual criteria including the excluding map. Light blue indicates the best areas for sand mines.

The final suitability map was supposed to be all of the above criteria added together. The raster calculator tool unfortunately did not work. If you were to add all of the values above the highest values would be considered the best place for a sand mine. That would mean that a value of 13 would be the highest and best value/place for a sand mine. As you can see in the water table map there is a value of 187. I attempted to fix this many times, even by running the reclassify tool over, but for some reason the value stayed there. This value does not appear to show up on the map and therefor can be ignored.