Northern Rockies ALR Final Project

For our final project, our group’s goal was to assess the validity of the ALR of the Northern Rockies region in BC. It was our desire to determine how much of the proclaimed reserve was actually suitable for farming purposes and to inform the public of possible misuses of the land.

Teamwork was critical for the completion of this project as we broke up the workload into specific tasks at the beginning and I think that everyone played a key role in putting the final report together. James and MC both worked on the actual processing and collecting of the crucial data for our analyses, I worked at representing our maps in an informative and easy to understand manner while Patricia collected everything into a cohesive report that highlighted our findings. While everyone had their own roles to fill, it was really more of a collaborative effort as we all helped each other. There were many instance where we all worked together, often times informing one another about what we wanted to display and show in the final report. It was this cooperation that I believe helped us create a report that effectively showed the inaccuracy of the ALR.

In the process of working on the Northern Rockies ALR I learned some interesting details about the project and GIS in general. I learned the importance of proper data management, proper communication with my group members and how difficult it is to find a good way of representing our maps. There were a number of occasions where as we were all working on our individual parts from the same shared data drive and as a result of improper data handling procedures we ended up working on the same geodatabase and then when we moved them back we ended up erasing someones progress and lost some crucial layers. This led to a lot of retracing of steps and wasted time as we worked to fix the issues. Proper communication was also a big factor as keeping informative workflow notes helped to stop confusion when putting the final project together. Having the role of cartographer and mapping such a small area I understood just how difficult it can be in deciding what areas need highlighting, what symbology would best display our information without distracting readers and how to best highlight the area’s features. It was also important to find a way to use inset maps effectively to show the full range of our region as it was spread out across a wide area within a limited size page.

This project combined all of the skills we had learned to use in GIS by working as a team to analyze the Northern Rockies region and evaluate the accuracy of the ALR. Our communication and presentational skills were showcased as we combined our findings and maps of the area in a final report that would be published to the public.