Final Presentation


Jeffrey Hessburg
Final Project
GIS II
Relocating the Big Lake Close Area Migratory Bird Hunting Refuge

Background & Objective
The Nelson/Trevino Bottoms is a very popular public duck hunting area. A waterfowl-refuge has been placed on the Big Lake. In this area, no one is allowed to hunt. The purpose of this area is to give the ducks a good and safe habitat to sleep and feed. A lot of hunters have become upset with this refuge because it blocks off a large portion of the easily accessible duck hunting land. This causes hunters to set up much closer to one another which is dangerous. It also also puts a lot of pressure on ducks, forcing them to migrate elsewhere. 
The objective of this project is to relocate the refuge. Ideally in the same watershed with the similar habitat. 

Literature Review
Looking at various journals, the most important part in consideration of a refuge is the type of habitat. Ducks will land either to feed or nest. This all ties into the type of wetland. Using the wetland data for the area, the goal will be to make the new refuge as similar as possible to the old refuge.

Processes 
Above is a map of of the Nelson/Trevino Bottoms. The dashed area is the current refuge. 
The first step was georefrencing the map using the georefrence tool. The map was georefrenced to fit an imagery base-map.




Above is an image of the georefrenced base-map. It aligned very well.
The next step was to digitize a polygon of the refuge.A new polygon feature class was created, then the edit tool was used to do the digitizing. This will be used to clip/erase other layers to analyze what is happening in the refuge: type of habitat and size of the refuge. Below is an image of the digitized polygon.


The next step was to add all of the data needed for the project. 
First a geodatabase was created to hold all of the data. Data added includes:
Watershed and the wetland habitat inside- to determine the focus area and the type of habitat in the current and future refuge.
Important Bird Areas- This data provided by the Wisconsin DNR highlights areas that are recognized to be crucial habitat for waterfowl and other bird species.
Roads- A buffer around roads will be added to remove areas that people wouldn't hunt at anyways

The citations at the bottom show where all of the data came from. 

A map of all of the added features is below

Next is to clip all of the features to the desired area of the new refuge. This is done using the clip tool found under geoprocessing. 
The major roads were clipped to the watershed layer.
The important bird areas were clipped to the watershed. Watershed was the large focus area.
The wetlands were clipped important bird areas. Important bird areas was narrowed down to the small focus area.
A map of the results is below. 
The next step was to clip wetlands to current refuge. Once completed, using the summarize tool and the WETLAND_TY as the field to summarize and the Sum of Acres as the output table, the percentages of each type of wetland habitat in the refuge can be determined. Below is the summarize tool used. 

The table and map of the wetland calculated is below. 

Out of 19873.98 acres / 8,540,498 Shape_Area
Freshwater Emergent Wetlands are 1.525%
Freshwater Forested/Shrub Wetlands are 0.9819%
Freshwater Ponds are 0.02478%
Lakes are 0.432%       
Riverine are 97.03%

Next the current refuge was erased so it wouldn't go into any calculations of a new refuge. This is done using the erase tool. Below is a map of the erased refuge. 


Next a buffer of 150 yards (137.16 meters) was created around the roads, then erased from the wetlands. Upon peer review, hunters shouldn't be within 150 yards of a road. This was set up so that the new refuge is only in hunt-able land. Below is the results of the erase. 

Looking at the new focus area, the objective is to find a chunk of land as similar to the current refuge as possible. Using the Edit tool and looking at the focus area a digitized polygon of a potential new refuge was made. Goals were set up to be as similar the old refuge as possible:
GOAL
Current Shape_Area 8,540,498    Be within 5% --> 8113473.1 - 8967522.9
Freshwater Emergent Wetlands are 0.5-5%
Freshwater Forested/Shrub Wetlands are 0.5-5%
Freshwater Ponds are not a priority
Lakes are 0.5-5%        
Riverines are 90-98%

Creating a new polygon feature class, a polygon was digitized to with an attempt to follow these goals. The wetland focus area was clipped from the polygon, then summarized to determine how similar it is. Below is an image of the results, and the statistics.   


Result 1
Shape area 8663961.3
Freshwater Emergent Wetlands 5.27%  too high
Freshwater Forested/Shrub Wetlands are 6.99% too high
Freshwater Ponds are not a priority
Lakes are 5.52% too high       
Riverines are 82.14% too low




Seeing what was too high, the polygon was edited to to have more riverine, and less of everything else. The wetland focus area was again clipped and summarized. This was the most challenging part of the project and took several attempts. The final results were of the new refuge is shown in the map below. The results of the summary are shown below the map


Result 2
Shape area 8,781,686
Freshwater Emergent Wetlands 4.5% 
Freshwater Forested/Shrub Wetlands are 3.8%
Freshwater Ponds are not a priority
Lakes are 3.6%           
Riverines are 90.00%

CONCLUSIONS
There has been a problem with hunters in the current refuge. This work shows that there are other areas in the region that may also be an effective waterfowl refuge. The WIDNR, USFWS, Ducks Unlimited, and similar groups may find this data useful in the consideration of a new refuge. With unlimited time and resources, future work could be done to pick out several more locations in the area that would be practical waterfowl refuges. Visitations to the site would be helpful to analyze the situation in person. Public hearings could be very beneficial to understand exactly how other people feel on the issue. 



CITATIONS

PEER REVIEW 
Burgess, H.H., 1969, Habitat Management on a Mid-Continent Waterfowl Refuge: The Journal of Wildlife Management, v. 33, p. 843, doi: 10.2307/3799315.

Johnson, F.A., 1995, Managing North American Waterfowl in the Face of Uncertainty: Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, v. 26, p. 177–199, doi: 10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.26.1.177. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.es.26.110195.001141

Smith, L. (1989). Habitat management for migrating and wintering waterfowl in North America. Lubbock,

DATA
Flyways
http://www.ducks.org/conservation/geographic-information-systems/gis-spatial-data-download/page2
Ducks Unlimited flyways display county assignments to flyway regions

Important Bird areas
https://data-wi-dnr.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/important-bird-areas?geometry=-92.36%2C44.332%2C-91.274%2C44.504
This data set reflects updates by WDNR through 10/31/2014.    This data layer is a polygon layer representing Important Bird Area Boundaries in Wisconsin, prepared by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR)

Wetlands
https://www.fws.gov/wetlands/Data/Mapper.html
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the principal Federal agency that provides information to the public on the extent and status of the Nation's wetlands. Through the National Wetlands Inventory, the agency has developed a dataset featuring wetlands and deepwater habitats. These data have been used extensively to make resource management decisions at the federal, state and local government levels.

Map of Nelson WI
https://www.fws.gov/uploadedFiles/Pool%204.pdf
Roads
https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/tiger-line-shapefile-2013-state-wisconsin-primary-and-secondary-roads-state-based-shapefile

Basemap
Esri, Digitalglobe, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA, USGS, AeroGrid, IGN, and the GIS User Community

Roads
Road data was provided by Dr. Curtis via mgis data.

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