LAND USE AND VEGETATIVE COVER

JUSTIFICATION FOR USE:

In identifying areas that would be most suitable for development, we felt that the existing land use or land cover would be an important factor in what, if anything, should be located nearby. As a result we decided to examine an existing land use information layer.

PROCESS:

This information layer was available to us in a digital format from the Florida Geographic Data Library (FGDL). While we got the data from FGDL, it is important to note they were not the creators of this information layer. Suwannee River Water Management District originally created the coverage, and they, in turn, gave it to the Geoplan Center for use in the FGDL. This information layer, or coverage, contained many different pieces of information, or fields, which we could analyze or display on the computer. One of the fields contained a description of the land use or land cover present in an area. This field originally contained different values for each of the different land use/cover types. We reclassified all of these values into one of three categories:

1 = Least suitable for development; 2 = Intermediate suitability; or 3 = Most suitable for development.

This classification format was used for all of the different information layers that our group created and analyzed. The reclassification was done so as to maximize the relative differences in susceptibility of each area. In other words, all of the category "1" areas have similar characteristics and are significantly different from the other two categories. The same holds for each of the other two categories as well.

RESULTS:

The result of our reclassification is a map that shows the three county area with each of the resultant three classifications which we created shaded a different color. This map then became one of many different information layers that were weighted and combined to give us our Residential and Commercial Intermediate Suitability Maps.