Raster Modeling

Goal
The purpose of this lab was to gain experience with several raster geoprocessing tools. The final product should contain models for suitability and impact of sand mining. The tasks completed in this lab are...

• Build a suitability model for sand mining
• Build a risk model for sand mining
• Combine results from above tasks to determine best locations for mining

Using the data downloaded in the earlier exercises along with the new tools learned throughout the course, suitable frac sand mining locations will be determined.

Methodology
The following methods were used to determine the suitability of the site criteria outlined below.

Site Criteria for Sand Mining Suitability:

• Geology
• Land Use Land Cover: Agricultural land use
• distance to railroads
• slope
• water table criteria

Before moving further, environments and masks were set to allow for faster geoprocessing. Because the data is a limited portion of Trempealeau County (TC), the mask was set to a certain boundary to avoid running tools on the entire county without any data. Suitability for each set of criteria can be found in Table 1 in the results.


Geology
To determine the suitable geological characteristics for a frac sand mine it is important to know what formations are best. As specified in in the initial background post, the Jordan and Wonewoc formations are the best for frac sand mining. The first step was to add the geology feature class that was found in the Ex8 geodatabase. From here, it needed to be converted into raster format. From here, a reclassify was performed to rank the geology types by suitability. As seen in Table 1, Wonewoc and Jordan Formations got the highest ranking because they are most desirable while the others got ranked a 1 for being least desirable. A map was then created sowing the locations of the desirable geologic material for frac sand mining.


Land Use Land Cover
The land use and land cover types of the area are important in determining the ease of building a frac sand mine in certain locations. When determining the land use and cover type of the areas throughout TC, referring to the figure 1 aids in deciding ranks.

Based on this figure, the rankings (found in table 1) were created. Areas of developed land were ranked lower because it would be more difficult to remove man-made structures and would be potentially hazardous to neighboring areas. Forested areas and water were also ranked as a 1 because these are areas that would be unrealistic to mine from. Clearing forests would lead to many negative environmental effects and loss of habitat and scenery for the county. Shrublands, herbaceous areas, and cultivated cropland were ranked at a 2. These areas would be able to be transformed into a mining operation but because they are already being used for agricultural purposes it would be best to leave them alone. Finally, barren and pasture land were ranked at the highest suitability. Barren land would be easy to build and would not have to remove anything or cause a disturbance during construction process. Pastured land is often flat and has little vegetation to get in the way or have to remove, allowing it to be a suitable land type.


Results
Throughout the course of the exercise, the following table was created to show the rankings of the suitability of the criteria. Reasoning behind these rankings are found above in the methodology for each of the criteria.



Geology
 The following map shows the locations of highly suitable geologic material needed for frac sand mining operations.

Land Use Land Cover

The following map was created to determine the possible locations for the frac sand mine operation based on the land use and land cover of the specified areas.