The topic for my project is looking at a good area for a Sandhill Crane wildlife refuge. This is important because with the population of the world getting larger people are now moving to areas that were previously unpopulated areas. Finding areas that migrating birds, like Sandhill cranes, can help State and Local Governments choose areas that will be put aside as a refuge, so that no future development will be done in these areas.
It is important to save these areas because every creature on this earth has a purpose and niche to their specific ecosystem. In the case of Sandhill cranes, they keep fish and invertebrate populations in check, eat waste grain that would otherwise go to rats. Finally, Sandhill cranes love riparian and wetland/floodplain areas, these areas are known to reduce flooding and help suck up harmful ingredients (oil, dioxychloride, etc.) that have the potential to go into our drinking water.
My methods to find an appropriate area was in a few steps. The Colorado Parks and Wildlife have a wonderful article showing a checklist of what habitats Sandhill Cranes prefer. One important part of the checklist was that they need to be 220 yards away from any human disturbance. To do this I used the roads layer, forest roads layer, rec points layer, and a powerline layer downloaded from ArcPro online. After these layers were added I created a buffer of 220 yards. Using a county layer of Colorado (from GIS 101) I erased these human impact areas and created a new layer showing areas in Colorado that showed this buffer. I used two raster layers from Landfire.gov, one showing the average height of vegetation and another showing the dominant habitat that were present. Using the reclass tool I found areas that fit the Crane’s habitat needs. I compared this data to the human impact data, clipped areas not found. Finally, I joined the two layers and picked the five that has the largest amount of high-quality habitat areas. I found five good areas that made logical sense.