GIS and Google Mapping Applications of Hardware Ranch Wildlife Management Area

Hardware ranch was purchased by the state of Utah from the Box Elder Hardware Company in 1945. The state then established the Hardware Ranch Wildlife Management Area to operate a winter feeding program for local elk herds. With the encroachment of towns and agriculture on elk’s winter habitat in cache valley, tensions between elk and farmers rose. The establishment of Hardware Ranch was meant to defeat this tension. Since the 1950’s the ranch has also been used as a center for elk research. Focuses for such research include biology and population dynamics.

Site Description and Ranch Purpose

Hardware Ranch is located approximately 15 miles up Blacksmith Fork Canyon in Cache Valley Utah. Blacksmith Fork canyon is directly east of Hyrum, Utah. The Ranch is a very unique place offering information about a variety of natural resources to the public. The ranch is operated by the Division of Wildlife Resources and administered by local management. Hardware Ranch essentially has two purposes: the enhancing of big game winter range, with a focus on maintaining healthy rangeland for all wildlife, and the increase in public awareness and personal stewardship through educational programs delivered by the ranch management. Mrs. Lee is the individual currently facilitating such educational programs.

Figure 3: Elk Meadow in winter at Hardware Ranch

Project Purpose

The purpose of this class project involves the development of a variety of maps that will be implemented into the educational curriculum used by Mrs. Lee. The project has been divided between three students, Ryan Christensen, Tyler Allen, and myself, and has also branched into some interesting analysis that should prove beneficial to Mrs. Lee’s curriculum. My portion of this project will concern the production of the following maps.

1. Digital orthophoto map of area with Hardware Ranch’s boundaries superimposed.

2. An interactive Google presentation showing the ranch’s location with respect to Logan and Hyrum city.

3. A property boundary map listing the total area of the ranch.

4. Property boundary map listing the total length of streams and roads encompassed by Hardware Ranch.

5. A GIS map of the handcart trails used in the summers with total length traveled.

6. Land cover map of the typical fauna prevalent at hardware ranch

Data Acquisition

Field data was collected for this project in the form of GPS points by myself, Ryan Christensen, and Tyler Allen. Data was collected on Utah State survey grade Ashtek GPS equipment. The data collected included elevations and locations of the south irrigation canal and its corresponding irrigation drain culverts. These culverts are used to water the elk meadow in the summer months for hay production. Field data was also given to me, courtesy of Mrs. Lee and a volunteer, for the GPS points used to develop the handcart trail shapefile. The latter’s data excluded elevations, and was presumably taken with a standard handheld GPS unit. The author would have liked to verify and augment this data with Utah State’s GPS equipment, but was not able to do so given the amount of time required to shoot such a survey.

All other data was downloaded from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, Utah Automatic Geographic Reference Center, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Environmental Management Research Group, and the USGS National Land Cover Dataset. Specific internet addresses are provided in the references.

Methods and Maps Created

Orthophoto Map

The first map that Mrs. Lee requested involves the use of digital orthophotos. Mrs. Lee stated some concern with students interpreting topographical maps of the area and expressed a desire to use digital orthophotos to convey the concept of relief and topography. It was felt that spatial relationships could be more tangible with the use of these digital orthophotos. The reader should note the distinct difference between a digital orthophoto and an aerial photograph. Aerial photography is subject to distortions that create a product that cannot be assumed to exist at the same scale throughout the photo. Digital orthophoto quadrangles (QOD’s) are set to a standard scale using mathematical means which orthogonally rectify the image. The product of this rectification process will have a set scale throughout and can be used in GIS applications (Tate, 1998). It was with this in mind that QOD’s were obtained from the AGRC to create Mrs. Lee’s map. A typical Orthophoto can be seen in the figure below.

Figure 4: Example Digital Orthophoto Quadrangle used in the Maps

Figure 5 below displays the same orthophoto combined with three others to cover the Hardware Ranch area. This figure also displays the boundaries of Hardware Ranch which are shown layered on top of the orthophotos in red. The digital orthophotos were loaded as features into ArcGIS with a jpeg format. The boundaries were delineated from a land ownership shapefile downloaded from the Bear River Watershed Information System. The shapefile was originally attributed with all the different land owners in the region. It had to further be manipulated into the shapefile used below defining only three total property owners. This was done because Mrs. Lee expressed a desire to acquire a map listing only neighboring properties. This was accomplished by analyzing the state attribute within the Land Ownership shapefile and selecting the appropriate boundaries to be represented on the map. When the selections were made, the selected attributes for the ranch boundary were exported into a new shapefile.

Figure 5: Map showing Hardware Ranch boundaries layered above four digital orthophotos

Interactive Google Map

The second map requested by Mrs. Lee was not so much a map as much as an interactive movie. Both ArcGIS and Google Earth were used to create this interactive experience to help students orient Hardware Ranch in relation to Logan, Utah. The key to uploading the ranch boundary shapefile into Google Earth lies in a tool developed by an individual working for the Bureau of Planning for the City of Portland. This individual created a tool that essentially takes an ArcGIS shapefile and converts it into a kml file used to represent objects in Google Earth. “KML, or Keyhole Markup Language, is an XML grammar and file format for modeling and storing geographic features such as points, lines, images, and polygons for display in Google Earth™, Google Maps™, and Google Maps for mobile (Google, 2006).” This tool is accessible through ESRI Support Center as an ArcScript. Once the kml is loaded into Google Earth, various points of interest can be highlighted with thumbtacks. These interest items can be further enhanced by linking them to pictures and WebPages. The thumbtacks seen below have these features attributed to them. Figure 6 shows a screen capture of the “tour” created in Google Earth to show the students Hardware Ranch’s general location. This tour may only be seen as a simple trail route if the user has not purchased a professional version of Google earth. It is possible to develop a .wmv movie file with such a version that will fly over the terrain in question, but one was not created for this application as such a version was not provided. The kml files activated through the following links will only display the uploaded property and trail shapefile and the reader will have to navigate in Google earth on their own.

The following hyperlinks will allow the viewer to see a tour of the trail and hardware ranch’s location. Just click the one you prefer to see. You may need to check the kml icon in the play menu of Google Earth to see the trail path!

For the handcart trail: PathKML.kml

For the Ranch’s relative geographic location: LocationKML.kml

Figure 6: Google Earth image showing Hardware Ranch’s location with respect to Logan, Utah.

Google allows the user to define a series of points in a playfile that will simulate a “flight” over the pertinent terrain between designated points. By setting up the points as a series of consecutive thumbtacks in the Play menu on the left of the Google Earth screen one can activate and deactivate the movie by clicking on the buttons seen in the figure 7 below. Care must be taken to highlight the appropriate tack to start the movie in or you may end up viewing feature polygons loaded with your kml that are not necessarily what you wanted to focus on.

Figure 7: Expanded Play Menu from the right side of the screen on Google Earth.

Property Boundary Map

The third map requested by Mrs. Lee was to show the ranch boundaries again with a clear representation of the total area encompassed by the borders. The property ownership information was obtained from the same land ownership shapefile as that which was used above to designate the state ownerships. With only two different ownerships surrounding Hardware Ranch, the properties of the land ownership shapefile was edited to just represent private and forest service ownership. Streams and roads were left visible and the hollow white area represents the ranch itself. An area calculation was conducted on the Hardware Ranch Boundary shapefile using the calculate values option after creating a new field in the shapefile’s feature class. The VBA code to accomplish this advanced calculation can be seen below.

                                                                  Dim dblArea as double

                                                                                                                                   Dim pArea as IAreaSet

                                                                                                                                   pArea = [shape]

                                                                                                                             dblArea = pArea.area

An example of this map can be seen below.

Figure 8: Property map of Hardware Ranch and surrounding areas.

Property Boundary Map with Streams and Roads

The next map that Mrs. Lee required was one that would delineate the total stream and road length found within the ranch boundaries. This was accomplished by downloading a NHD Flowline shapefile and a btsroads shapefile from the National Hydrography Dataset and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, respectively. Once loaded as features in ArcGIS both shapefiles could be used to create a new shapefile of the streams and roads truncated by the borders of the ranch. The select by Location command was used to clip these shapefiles and to create a new shapefile for each of polylines that were only encompassed by the boundaries. Before the process can be accomplished, one must open ArcCatalog and create two new polyline shapefiles to receive the results. The figure below shows the Select by Location dialog box executing this process for the roads (renamed from btsroads) shapefile.

Figure 9: Select by Location dialog box.

The resulting map can be seen in Figure 10 below.

Figure 10: Map showing the total length of streams and roads within the ranch boundaries.

Handcart Trail Map

The fifth map requested by Mrs. Lee involved the handcart trek that takes place at the ranch ever summer. The handcart trek is a youth activity designed to give young men and women a chance to experience a part of Utah State history. The trek is designed to allow the youth to experience the realistic and historical experience of pushing handcarts over rugged terrain. This experience is designed to give an appreciation for the original Utah pioneers handcart experiences. The trek consists of two camp sites and approximately 9.09 miles of trail.

The data used to define the Handcart Trails route was collected with a GPS unit by a volunteer for the ranch during this last years trek. The data is lacking in elevations but could still be brought easily into an ArcGIS point feature class by using the add x y data tool. Prior to this importation, the data must be manipulated into decimal latitude and longitude values and saved as an excel file with a DBF 4 (dBase IV) (*.dbf) file format. The following figure 11 shows the original excel GPS point datafile imported into ArcGIS.

Table 1: GPS data points used to delineate Handcart Trail.

Handcart Trail Waypoints
deg	min	sec	Latitude	deg	min	sec	Longitude	Description
41	36	23.3	41.60647	111	34	47.6	-111.579889	Trek Start
41	36	47.2	41.61311	111	34	36.3	-111.57675
41	37	1.7	41.61714	111	33	57.6	-111.566	Top of Rattlesnake Road
41	36	34.9	41.60969	111	34	0.4	-111.566778	Break
41	36	28.2	41.60783	111	33	46.6	-111.562944	Gate
41	36	38.4	41.61067	111	33	31	-111.558611
41	36	27.5	41.60764	111	33	24	-111.556667
41	36	29.2	41.60811	111	33	14.9	-111.554139
41	36	25.2	41.607	111	33	10.1	-111.552806	Gate
41	36	19.1	41.60531	111	33	12.1	-111.553361	Gate to Camp #1
41	37	13.5	41.62042	111	33	32.9	-111.559139	Summit
41	37	35.2	41.62644	111	33	1.4	-111.550389
41	37	48.9	41.63025	111	33	15.8	-111.554389	Gate
41	37	51.6	41.631	111	33	25.2	-111.557
41	37	56.3	41.63231	111	33	23.5	-111.556528	Gate
41	37	57.5	41.63264	111	33	34.2	-111.5595
41	38	1.6	41.63378	111	33	36.1	-111.560028
41	38	2.9	41.63414	111	33	38.4	-111.560667	Water #1
41	38	11.5	41.63653	111	33	35.7	-111.559917	Water #2
41	38	11.1	41.63642	111	33	31.2	-111.558667
41	38	18.1	41.63836	111	33	27.8	-111.557722	Camp #2
41	38	20.4	41.639	111	33	19.5	-111.555417	Road Entry to Camp #2

Once the 22 GPS points were brought into ArcGIS the sketch command was utilized to trace the trek route between them. It was unfortunate that a more thorough GPS survey could not be conducted of the trail as this would facilitate the use of the Creating Features from Text File Tool, and simplify the creation of a trail shapefile. This tool would have created polylines that would have intersected at the points defined by the imported GPS points. With only the 22 GPS waypoints given it was necessary to trace the Handcart trails path using the uploaded GPS waypoints and a provided topographic map with the drawn trek route as a reference. This was directly due to the trails wandering path between given GPS waypoints. Lengths were then calculated in an edit session using the calculate values command and the following VBA code shown below.

Dim dblLength as double

Dim pCurve as ICurve

Set pCurve = [shape]

dblLength = pCurve.Length

Figure 12 below shows the trail lengths in their individual segments. Total lengths were given by using the statistics option for the length field in the handcart trail attribute table.

Figure 11: The lengths of the trail segments shown summarized in the statistic dialogue box.

The following map show in figure 13 is an orthophoto overlaid by the handcart trail shapefile and the original GPS waypoints with roads, property boundaries, and streams present for reference.

Figure 12: Map of the Handcart Trail displaying the total length.

Google Image of Handcart Trail

Mrs. Lee expressed some interest in developing a Google Earth image of the Handcart Trail system for topographical reference by participants. The following figure 14 is a screen capture used for this image from a kml loaded into Google earth representing the trail network. A flyover of this trail is available in the previously mentioned Google Earth kml.

Figure 13: Screen capture of Google Earth developed Handcart Trail imprted from ArcGIS.

Handcart Trail Profile

In an attempt to generate a handcart trail profile map for Mrs. Lee, DEM’s were downloaded from the AGRC and brought into ArcGIS as raster images. Although not specifically requested, this map was felt to be of considerable worth by the author for distribution to handcart trail participants. By overlaying the original handcart trail GPS points onto the DEM rasters, elevations could be gathered for each GPS waypoint. This data was exported into Excel along with the distances between the points along the trek path, and a profile was generated to apply to the layout view of the map. Figure 15 below shows the map generated with these analyzation techniques.

Figure 14: Handcart Trail Profile Map giving distances and elevations for waypoints.

Land Cover Map

The final map that Mrs. Lee was interested in was a map representing the land cover found up in Hardware Ranch. This required the downloading of a National Land Cover Data (NLCD) grid (nlcdgrid) from the Bear River Watershed Information System. NLCD uses a modified form of the USGS’s Anderson Land Use and Land Cover Classification system (Anderson et al., 1972). NLCD is a categorical land cover data system which assigns a color to a raster image pixel. Pixels represent 30 by 30 meter sample areas and are assigned their color designation based on the majority of cover present. An area exhibiting 51 percent deciduous tress and 49 percent Evergreen trees will be assigned a color distinction for the deciduous cover (Patterson and Kelso, 2004). The NLCD classification system consists of a two level system with nine level-one cover categories and 21 level two categories (Patterson and Kelso, 2004). The following graphic taken from Patterson’s and Kelso’s article represents these levels.

Figure 15: (left) The NLCD classification with USGS assigned colors. (right). The derivative color palette used for natural-color mapping (Patterson and Kelso, 2004).

The grid nature of the nlcdgrid feature class required the hardware ranch boundaries to be converted into a raster image so that the raster calculator could be used to sum the layers into a new Calculation raster representing the portions of the original land cover data encompassed within the hardware ranch boundaries. A new area field was added to this new Calculation raster and values were calculated for areas representing each land cover class. The VBA code entered to do this area calculation can be seen below.

                                                                  Dim dblArea as double

                                                                                                                                   Dim pArea as IAreaSet

                                                                                                                                    pArea = [shape]

                                                                                                                             dblArea = pArea.area

Remembering that the output cell size was 30 meters by 30 meters, the areas of each land cover area can then be computed for all areas in hardware ranch. Figure 16 below illustrates the map created using this analyzation technique.

Figure 16: Land Cover Map of Hardware Ranch and its Boundaries with calculated areas for the land cover classes.

It should be noted in the above map that the majority of the elk meadow is designated as small grains by the land cover data downloaded from Bear River Watershed Information System. This begs question of blindly accepting such data, due to the lack of planted small grains anywhere within the elk meadow in the last five years. The elk meadow has only been used for pasture and hay agriculture in the last few years (Marni Lee, personal communication, Oct 20, 2006). The author could have altered the legend display to represent actuality, but felt it important to leave the data as it was imported to display this inaccuracy.

Results and Conclusions

The results of this class project can be directly observed in the maps seen above. Furthermore, a variety of geographical information has been presented to Mrs. Lee that will enhance her curriculum for hardware ranch educational programs. This information can be seen below.

The total area of hardware ranch’s boundaries surrounding the visitor center is 11.18 square miles. This would correlate to close to 7200 acres. The total stream length encompassed in the immediate ranch boundaries is 13.2 miles while the total length of roads is 15.39 miles. The total handcart trail length as presented with the given GPS waypoints is 9.09 miles. The maximum elevation experienced by a trek participant will be 6151.41 feet with a minimum elevation of 5514.83 feet. The total elevation change experienced along the trek will be 636.58 feet and the longest leg of the trek will be 3.59 miles. The greatest area of the ranch is occupied by scrublands with the next largest area as grassland/herbaceous. Deciduous forest is the next largest area component of the ranch and the areas for these three covers are 8.72, 1.43, and 0.41 square miles respectively. The reader is also cautioned that maps seen in the document have been changed in scale from their original status. As such the provided scale bars are not to be assumed accurate. Actual maps plotted for use by hardware ranch are to scale.

Further Research

There is certainly a need to GPS survey the handcart trail more thoroughly. Many more points should be shot and used to define the trail path in ArcGIS. It would also be nice to complete a survey of the ranch boundaries using the same equipment. This would allow verification between the downloaded land ownership shapefiles and actual survey data. It would be interesting to consider a soil classification map of the ranch area and to see if there is any correlation between it and a variety of observable factors at the ranch.

References

Anderson, James R., Hardy, Ernest E., and Roach, John T. 1972. A Land-use Classification System for use with Remote-sensor Data. U.S. Geological Survey Circular 671.

Bureau of Transportation Statistics, btsroads, http://www.bts.gov/programs/geographic_information_services/index.html (Nov 23, 2006).

Environmental Manegment Research Group, Land Ownership Boundaries, http://emrg.usu.edu/ (Dec 1, 2006).

Google Earth, Google KML documentation, http://earth.google.com/kml/

(Dec 8, 2006).

Maidment, D. R. (2002). Arc Hydro GIS for water Resources, 1^nd Ed., ESRI Press, Redlands, CA.

National Hydrography Dataset, NHDFlowlines, http://nhd.usgs.gov/

(Nov 29, 2006).

Patterson, T. and Kelso, N. V., 2004., Hal Shelton Revisted: Designing and Producing Natural-Color Maps with Satellite Land Cover Data, http://www.shadedrelief.com/shelton/c.html, (Dec 8, 2006).

Tate, E. (1998). “Remote sensing with digital orthphotos.” http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/grad/tate/research/orthophotos.html, (Dec. 5, 2006).

USGS National Land Cover Dataset, Land Cover Data, http://seamless.usgs.gov/

(Dec. 7, 2006).

Utah Automatic Geographic Reference Center, Digital Orthophot Quadrangles, ftp://ftp.agrc.state.ut.us/DRG_83/ (Dec 4, 2006).

Utah Automatic Geographic Reference Center, Digital Topo Maps, ftp://ftp.agrc.state.ut.us/DRG_83/ (Dec 4, 2006).