SPAT1007 Geographic Information System Assessment
- Subject Code :
SPAT1007
THE SCENARIO
You are working for small consulting company called Geographic Intelligence Services and have been asked to do some work for Megacorp, an international Venture Capital company. Somewhat unsettled by the recent financial market, Megacorp have decided to invest heavily in the basic means of production, agricultural land. Their Agricultural Investment Expert has targeted SW Western Australia and has commissioned you to carry out a preliminary analysis. In order not to warn the market you will be using only data that are freely available. Your task is to obtain preliminary information about areas that meet the company's ideas of suitable places. You are to present a report to Megacorp outlining your findings. Depending on the outcomes of this initial phase of the project, and your ability to produce these outcomes, you may (hopefully!) be asked to tender for the next phase of the project.
At this early stage of the project, you (in consultation with the Agricultural Investment Expert) have been able to source some data as follows: (actual data sources are provided for your information)
From Geoscience Australia’s 1:1,000,000 spatial data base, the following shapefiles:
- Major_towns_GDA.shp,Major towns in the area of interest
- shp,Major roads in the area of interest
- shp,Rail lines in the area of interest
- watercourses_GDA.shp,rivers and streams in the area of interest
From the Western Australian Land Information system, Via the Shared Land information Platform (SLIP)
- shp,Broad level soil zone mapping for the area of interest
- shp,all land in the area of interest that is registered as the responsibility of the Department of Environment and conservation
- shp,(Rainfall shapefile represents 30?year average of WA rainfall, processed from BOM)
The Agricultural Investments Expert (Dr Brat Kartoffeln from Megacorp’s European office) has also provided you with the following
- shp,The study area as defined by Megacorp
- txt,Minor towns within the west of Western Australia
- txt,An interpretation, by Dr Kartoffeln, of the major soil types in the zones shown in Soil_zones_GDA.shp, based on published data and his somewhat shaky grasp of soil science
The criteria that Megacorp has determined for the preliminary study are as shown below: Land must be:
- Within120 km of any of the ports of Albany, Bunbury or Kwinana;
- Bein a zone with soils categorized as either “Sandy duplex” or “Colluvial”;
- Bein neither State Forest or National Park;
- Bein an area where the rainfall is greater than or equal to 600 mm per
THE REPORT
In your report carry out the following GIS steps and answer the required questions.
- Examinethe various data layers provided and report their coordinate systems (including the major properties). Tabulate the data for ease of
- Whatis the difference(s) between GDA1994 and GDA2020? Why is GDA2020 superior to GDA1994?
- What are the major stepsused to prepare a geodatabase for this project? What is the name of your geodatabase? What are the feature datasets and feature classes used in the geodatabase? Provide a
- How many fields are in the file named ‘places.txt’? What processing steps are used to convert the text file toa shape file?
- How many soil zones are obtained when converting text file (SoilType.txt) to a shape file? If extracting soil ID259 and creating a separate data layer, what GIS step(s) are essential in the conversion process?
- Describe the operation to obtain Rainfall ?600
- To satisfy the criteria ‘Be in neither State Forest or National Park’, what GIS operation was used? Provide a short
- What is the Railroad feature type? In order to derive Multiple railroads from the layer named Rail_GDA.shp, what operation is required? How many Multiple railroads are retrieved with the operation?
- Develop a structure chart for the work, revealing the steps used to derive the final suitable areas (lands).
- Produce a map, showing locations of the possible areas greater than 10 km2. Show all cartographic elements in the map.
