The purpose of our project was to gain insight into the state of the ALR of the Bulkley Nechako administration region in northern BC. The Agricultural Land Reserve represents some of the most fertile soil available for farming in the province. It was our responsibility to gather information regarding its use, agricultural output, past land developments, and any threats to the ALR’s existence.
Each member of the team was assigned maps, and was responsible for gathering the applicable data and performing the necessary analysis functions for each assigned map. We spent much of our time together, however, and helped each other as best as we could.
My most valuable contributing to the group was gathering, formatting, and editing some of the extensive land cover data we used in Map 2, and performing the mosaic functions on the DEM in Map 4.
Jannie was extremely valuable to our group because she had extensive knowledge of most of the analysis commands we were performing. I found myself checking with her almost every step of the way.
I was surprised by the extensive area of the ALR in Bulkley Nechako; I thought it was smaller. The relatively poor quality of soil and the cold, dry climate means that extensive farming cannot take place here. Around a third of the ALR has already been claimed for non-agricultural activities; such a large proportion does come as a surprise to me.
The mosaic technique used on the DEMs was the first time I have performed that. On our final Map (determining how much ALR is untouched) we performed a join function to merge all our vectors together, and then an erase function to leave only the unaffected ALR left.
This would have been an extremely difficult project to finish individually. There is an extensive amount of data to gather, which is much more time consuming than one thinks. Dividing up the maps between each other helped immensely as well; it is much better to have several people checking each others’ progress. It is easy to miss an important map element on yourself.
One of the issues we had with the data management was the availability restrictions on DataBC; not all information was available to the public. Managing data became difficult when space on the H:/ drive started to run out; we had to keep our geodatabases minimal.
Overall, a good learning experience in the frustrations in gathering public data, ArcGIS functions not doing what you expect them to do, and the importance of good teamwork.
