As a final project for GEOB270, we were to conduct a geographic analysis to investigate the reports made by the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) about the Agricultural Land Reserves (ALR). Assigned the Skeena Queen Charlotte subpanel region of the ALC, our team worked together to recalculate the actual land suitable for agriculture in the project area (See attached completed report: An Analysis of the Skeena Queen Charlotte ALR Land). As a team of three, we assigned certain tasks to each other to maximize the efficiency of the work, but maintaining good teamwork as to support each other throughout the entire process. With my strengths in researching, I contributed by searching for the appropriate data required in the final project. I thank both my team members Rachel Maj and Claire Shepansky who contributed with great teamwork, and helped me out when I was struggling with my own tasks. I give particular credit to Claire Shepansky who helped the team progress with her strong knowledge with the GIS software and the science behind the work. Claire demonstrated excellent leadership and I feel she should be given much credit for that.
Through the investigation itself on the ALR in the Skeena Queen Charlotte region, I was very surprised by how little land is actually suitable for agricultural activities compared to what is reported by the commission report. In fact, with our subpanel region alone, over 18% of the reported ALR land was not viable for farming.
In doing the actual analysis, I gained greater understanding of how GIS and ArcGIS works, and became much more familiar with it than before. When working on the Roads layer, to combine the 6 different mapsheets, I became very familiar with re-projecting, merging, clipping, and then buffering the roads.
When first starting the project, we were lost to how we were going to actually divide the work, however we quickly picked up ways to distribute tasks by having one person in charge, and the other two supporting the one with the better understanding of the software. In that way, we were able to work quite efficiently. We struggled quite a bit to figure out away to safely share the data without losing or corrupting the files, but eventually figured out that we could work primarily through one team member’s account and transfer files to that account.
For our particular region of the Skeena Queen Charlotte, we struggled with the soils data retrieved from the Government site because there was a gap in our data that totalled to 12% of data was missing. Due to this, although we can make claims about the available data, we are very limited to make a clear conclusion about the entire subpanel region.