The purpose of our GEOB 270 final project was to determine and quantify how much of the agricultural land reserve in the Central Kootenay Region is actually available and suitable for agriculture by applying data analysis tools learnt throughout the course.
The team was organized using meistertask, a free online project management software, that allowed to coordinate the work, set deadlines and assign tasks. A google doc was also used that permitted the team to edit the report and work on it all together without having to plan additional meetings.
My personal most valuable contribution to the team project was compiling all the maps and making sure that they all are consistent in their format, easily viewable and understandable and representative of the features in question. The maps can be found in the Central Kootenay Final Project Report under appendix C. I would also really like to thank my team member David Waine for organizing all the data and finalizing the analysis of the Central Kootenay ALR. His work can be viewed by downloading the Central Kootenay Final Project Shapefile that indicates all the land within the ALR that is suitable for agriculture.
As a result of completing the assessment of the ALR of Central Kootenay I have learnt and discovered a broad range of things. I learnt that although the ALR is land that is set aside by the provincial government for agriculture, it cannot all be used for that purpose due to and already existing landuse of some of the areas or unsuitable slope and can be severely limited by poor soil capabilities. A new GIS analysis tool that has not been taught previously in the class and that I discovered by doing this project is Mosaic to DEM. It allows to connect all the different tiles of the DEM into one area that fits over the project area.
To complete the analysis part of our final project, we had to orchestrate a lot of group meetings in order to carry out our work successfully and without delays as it was very interdependable in its nature. It helped to have one person responsible for storing all the data. Our group was able to accessed some publicly available data which was convenient, however such data lacked metadata and this raised a question of reliability of the source.