Applications Week 6 Part 2: Corridor Analysis

In this part of the lab, we analyzed the most suitable corridor for black bears to travel between two parts of Coronado National Forest. The criteria given were an elevation raster, a land cover raster, and a roads shapefile. I used Euclidean Distance to create a raster of each cell’s distance from the nearest road. I reclassified this raster, along with the elevation and land cover rasters, on a suitability scale of 1-10 according to the specifications in the lab instructions. I then used Weighted Overlay (land cover: 60%, elevation: 20%, and road distance: 20%) to combine these three rasters. Using Raster Calculator, I created a cost surface by subtracting the weighted suitability raster from 10. I used Cost Distance to create two cost distance rasters from the two national park areas, which I then combined using the Corridor tool to create a raster of costs for corridors between them. I then adjusted the classifications and symbology for the corridor raster until I found a corridor of a reasonable width (shown below in yellow). I also included a wider corridor of slightly less preferred corridors for bears (in orange) on my map. The best corridor shown on the map indicates the path between the two national forest areas that best satisfies the conditions that black bears like: far from roads, mid elevation (1200-2000 m), and preferred land cover types, such as forest.

 

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