We decided to conduct and analysis on the Island of Hawai’i to ultimately find the three safest locations on which we can build the Pineapple Palace Resort and Spa (yellow stars). We wanted to find locations that kept our guests safe but also allowed them to be near the ocean and have easy access to nearby attractions and towns.
For this project I worked with 3 other people: Camille, Kristina, and Nicole. Each person took a different section to work on while we all collaboratively worked on the introduction and conclusion. While I was gathering data and putting them into ArcGIS, other group mates started working on creating the maps, outlining the flow chart, and beginning the write up. When we weren’t in lab, we would communicate via Google docs and Facebook.
As a result of the process, I learned that there are many different factors that you need to take into account when planning to build somewhere. We only gathered data from a handful of different layers, but there are much more environmental concerns that need to be taken into account, such as areas of endangered animal species, soil layer composition, etc. It’s interesting that most of the hotels built on the Island of Hawai’i are in the tsunami evacuation zone, and because we did not want to put our guests in danger, we decided not to build in these zones.
In regards to teamwork/project management, I leaned that it is very difficult to schedule a meet up time with group members outside of the scheduled lab time to complete the project. I also learned that someone needs to take control and lead the group. Because the data is stored on the H drive, which is is linked to one person’s account, it’s difficult to allow other members to work on the map in ArcGIS if they don’t have access to your data.
We had no problem acquiring the data from the Hawai’i Office of Planning website, and we knew it was accurate and could be trusted, but we weren’t really sure if this data was up to date.