Reintroduction of the Razorback Quahog
For my Fundamentals of Geospatial Analysis final project, I was tasked with identifying reintroduction sites for the Razorback Quahog — a shellfish once abundant and integral to the Plum Island Estuary seafood economy — most suitable based on a number of different critera. Given a list of potential reintroduction sites, I found which sites were safe from peak storm water discharge, safe from regions of probable eutrophication, and which sites had sufficient adjacent salt marsh area within a local radius.
I used buffers to find adjacent salt marsh area within a 500 meter radius, accumulated cost across a distance using a resistance surface raster and found where accumulated resistance is equal to or greater than the peak flow rate from each gauge, interpolated nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations using inverse distance weighted interpolation techniques, found the nitrogen to phosphorus ratio across the estuary, and used a number of conditional statements to categorize each site based on each criteria.
Interpolating the Depth of Yellowstone Lake
For this project I compared a number of interpolation techniques to the true depth of Yellowstone Lake using sampled depth points across the lake. I calculated summary statistics to identify which methods work best. Kriging, accounting for spatial autocorrelation, does arguable the best job!
Finding the Topographic Relative Moisture Index (TRMI) of the Grandfather Mountain Region
For another project, I found the Topographic Relative Moisture Index (TRMI) for the Grandfather Mountain Region in North Carolina, as a proxy for identifying places of high moisture and predicting where streams exist. I compared it to actual stream data to assess accuracy. Four different components are scaled and combined to create this index: Configuration (whether there are concave or convex topographical features in the landscape), Steepness (slope), Relative Slope Position (Slope relative to surrounding features), and Aspect (direction of slope).