Browsing by Subject "ArcGIS"

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    1 Linking Land Use and Water Quality: Guiding Development Surrounding Durham County’s Drinking Watershed
    (2012-04-26) Levin, Katie Rose
    Abstract Linking Land Use and Water Quality: Guiding Development Surrounding Durham County’s Drinking Watershed By Katie Rose Levin May 2012 Cities and Counties have an obligation to provide water to their citizens in the quality and quantity necessary to support a viable existence. To meet these demands, in 1929 Durham City dammed the Flat River, creating the reservoir named “Lake Michie” in the far north eastern part of Durham County. Although located in a primarily rural area, there are signs that stormwater runoff is having detrimental effects on Lake Michie. The reservoir has already lost a quarter of its holding capacity to sedimentation, and was recently classified as Eutrophic by the USGS. Development pressure will only increase, as for the last ten years Durham County’s population has grown faster than the average across the state. To address development concerns, Durham county and city created the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) which provides enhanced protection for the land in the Lake Michie Watershed. The UDO limits the amount of impervious surface allowed on any one parcel in the watershed to 6%, while allowing a transfer of development between parcels to discourage urban sprawl. In addition to the protection afforded by codes, Durham managers are interested in creating a unified conservation scheme, based on preserving parcels as forested areas. This Project provides information and maps that can be used for conservation planning. Through combining topography, soils, and land use, areas likely to have highest impact on water quality are highlighted. Using this information, parcels can be evaluated based on their relative impact on water quality. Likewise, parcels can be compared against each other for the relative impact they have on water quality, informing transfers of impervious surface areas to meet development code. By combining the scientific evaluation of land use effects with the political boundaries of parcel ownership officials can easily translate science into the politics of conservation and development. Just like the New Hope Creek and Eno River conservation maps, now Lake Michie has a scientifically based conservation map to help officials and land managers preserve water quality into the future. Adviser: Dr. Dean Urban
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    ItemOpen Access
    GIS Project to Categorize and Map Smalltooth Sawfish (Pristis pectinata) Shoreline and Nearshore Habitat Features in Southwest Florida
    (2022-04-22) Dar, Rabiya
    This project was conducted in cooperation with NOAA Fisheries to support the management of smalltooth sawfish (Pristis pectinata) in Charlotte Harbor, Florida. Smalltooth sawfish have experienced a serious decline in their range due to commercial and recreational fishing, entanglement, illegal trade, and coastal development. In the United States, they once ranged from Texas to North Carolina, but are now only found in parts of southern Florida. NOAA Fisheries manages smalltooth sawfish under the purview of the Endangered Species Act and has designated Charlotte Harbor and the Ten Thousand Islands/Everglades as critical habitat units for the U.S. distinct population of this species. These areas were chosen as they have an abundance of mangroves in shallow, euryhaline water which is prime nursery habitat for sawfish. This project focuses on the Charlotte Harbor unit of critical habitat and utilizes ArcGIS to categorize the shoreline with emphasis on classifying and analyzing mangroves to identify priority sawfish habitat. A supervised classification using the maximum likelihood classification method is used to categorize the shoreline into three classes: mangrove, other vegetation, and non-vegetation. Classified mangroves are then analyzed to identify contiguous mangrove patches, mangrove distance to shoreline, and mangrove neighborhood density. The products from this project will be combined with other datasets to develop a sawfish distribution model. Such a model could be useful in predicting sawfish abundance across seascapes to promote better management of this endangered species.