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Geostatistical Tools for Describing Ontario's Ecoregions
Abstract
It is the mandate of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR) to provide
the necessary guidance and enforcement in making informed decisions about Ontario's
landscape. Our client, the Planning and Research Section of the OMNR's Ontario Parks
branch, needs to make informed decisions about the conservation of Ontario's landscape
while maintaining opportunities for visitors to participate in recreational activities.
"The Ecological Land Classification" dataset was developed by Dr. W. J. Crins, a revision
of the original work by G. Angus Hill in 1959. This system contains three levels of
categories - ecozones, ecoregions, and ecodistricts, nested in the order described.
Ecoregions are characterized by broad climatic patterns, mainly temperature, precipitation,
and functions thereof.1
The project's goal is to produce statistics and maps of relevant data based on the 14 ecoregions of Ontario.
This project is built on the analysis provided by a previous group: "Ecoregional Mapping
in the Province of Ontario". Two data sources were introduced for this project; 1)
Natural Resource and Values Information System (NRVIS) human corridors, and 2) a
classified LandSat raster dataset. The human corridors were created by appending NRVIS
line layers of roads into ecodistrict sized areas, buffering the roads using up to two
attributes, buffering rail and utility line layers, and then combining all the resulting
buffer polygons into a single layer. The corridors were then statistically summarized
for each ecodistrict for which there was source data and the land cover dataset was
statistically summarized for each ecoregion.
Once manual methods were established for creating statistics and maps, an integrated
geostatistical toolset in ESRI's ArcGIS environment was programmed. The toolset
automates procedures such as appending, joining, and buffering, on top of providing
useful statistical and map output. Five tools were planned; the overall job manager,
a line coverage appender, a complex buffering tool, a polygon joining tool and a
descriptive statistics batch calculator. The toolset produced allows the client to
input parameters such as buffer size, attribute value limits, study area, and input
data layers to be analyzed. A single run of the tool could result in many maps and
multiple descriptive statistics about a set of data spanning multiple study areas.
1 Ecoregional Mapping in the Province of Ontario
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