Summary

For our final project, our team of Shafae, Aryanna and myself proposed to analyze the changes in population of Melospiza melodia at the University of British Columbia during 2006 and 2011. It was our goal to find out if the ongoing construction at UBC and the increase in population size was playing a role in decreasing the species population.

Project Management

Since Aryanna couldn’t meet with us due to a family situation and the bus strike issue, Shafae and I decided to make both of the maps and have Aryanna do the bulk of the report. I decided that I would do map 1, methodology and the flow charts, Shafae would do map 2, errors and uncertainty and further research/recommendations and Aryanna would be responsible for the abstract, introduction and discussion and results. I made these decisions based on how I had completed my map very quickly and therefore it made sense that I did the parts of the report that involved all the steps involved in the map making.

Learning Experience

I learned many interesting things from doing this process. I was surprised to see that the decrease in population of Melsopiza melodia from 2006 to 2011 was over 20%. I would have thought, in a short period of only 5 years, that the loss would be lower, especially considering how much forestry is still around UBC. I also learned that Melsopiza melodia can actually thrive in urban settings and in shrub areas. This project helped me get a better understanding of the many techniques that I have learned over the semester in ArcMap. I learned how to make better use of the editor tool to make a layer with my own drawn UBC boundary by being able to use the polygon construction tool and make small connections to get an accurate representation of the boundary. I feel like our teamwork and project management approach could have been improved. We decided to meet just a week before the deadline, which made things more difficult than it had to be. We also met together only once and this caused some confusing when the maps were being created. Since I made the UBC boundary, I should have sent this shape file to Shafae so he could use the exact same border, but I didn’t think about it and did not think he would not be able to draw something similar. We had some issues as well with not having similar data between the years. For 2006, most of the data for UBC was constrained to just the campus while 2011 had data for most of the census tract. Overall, this project helped me in many ways to hone my skills in ArcMap and it will help me learn from my mistakes during my next project.

Project link: Final Project