Site Suitability Analysis

Mitigating Black Bear and Park Visitor Interactions

In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park the black bears have been interacting with park visitors, mostly around park roads and trails. Biologists have previously relocated the black bears but they keep returning to trails and roads. I have been tasked with finding areas within the park that would provide the bears with supplies that would mitigate the park’s interactions.

I was provided five files of data from NCSU GIS 520 course materials and used ArcGIS Pro version 2.9 to aid me. The trails, roads, streams and vegetation data was a line shapefile, the elevation data is raster data. For the line shapefile data I first needed to convert that data into a raster type data using the feature to raster tool. I then used the euclidean distance tool with distance of 1609.344 feet (1 mile) which creates a buffer like distance from the trails, roads and streams data. My elevation data I ran the slope tool to calculate the gradient per raster cell. I reclassified all the data separately to label specific attributes with values. These values indicate which attributes are more favorable to find an area that would mitigate bear interactions. I finally ran a weighted overlay tool with all the reclassified data. Within the weighted overlay I labeled the more favorable values most important and the least favorable values least important.

Figure 1: Model Representing Processes to Help Mitigate Bear Interactions

Suitability analysis allows a user to label an attribute a value. The reclassify tool and the weighted overlay function allowed me to assign values of importance. There are steps that one must do to perform the weighted overlay. First, is to define the problem, break the model into subsections, and identify the input layers. Then reclassify the input data, assign weighted values and then combine the layers. Finally, the result should be analyzed then presented.