Where
would be the most ideal location to build a new par 3 9-hole golf course in
Outagamie County? Outagamie County already has ten golf courses, so it would be
important to plan a course to be in a region of the county where there is not a
course. Thus giving this new golf course its own new audience and not stealing
business from other courses. In order to find a location for this new golf
course I downloaded data off the GIS servers containing information about major
roadways, city or town centers, previously built golf courses, and parks. For
this lab I will only use park locations as suitable locations to build a golf
course instead of available farm land or forestry land due to the fact of time
and resources. For this project my intended audience would be the Park and
Recreation departments for the cities of Outagamie County, or a private owner
who is interested in building a new golf course. But because this golf course
is going to be built on land already being used for parks it will have to be
for the Park and Rec Departments.
In
order to answer my question on where to build a new 9-hole golf course in
Outagamie County, I had to download multiple data sets.
The following paragraphs will work through the data flow
model.
These data sets started with the United States and County
data. From those two files I was able to export Outagamie County and begin to
add additional material to the map for just Outagamie County rather than the
whole country. Next I added Cities and Major Highways to the county data.
Before adding any other data I created a buffer on both of these data sets. I
created a five mile buffer around the cities and a one mile buffer around the
major highways. I then intersected the two data sets to come up with the
largest area possible for a new golf course to be built. I still have more data
to add to the equation before finding the ideal location, but this first area
gave me a rough idea on where I could put the course.
After intersect the two previous ideal locations, I have a
much better understanding on where ideal land would be that is still within
five miles of a city and one mile of a major highway, but is still three miles
away from any other golf course. On the above image the light yellow/white color
is all available area to build this new golf course, while the light blue is
any area that does not fit all three categories. The next step was to insert
the parks data. The park data will be intersected with the map above and any
park that falls within the white area will be available to be selected.
All data for this project was downloaded from ESRI servers
or Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources servers.
Working
with this data I came across many issues with the data. The first issue I came
across was when I imported the data set labeled golf courses only three came
up. All three courses were along the US-41 Highway leaving everything but the
Southeast corner available for a course. I overcame this issue by importing
Recreation Areas and finding out they had ten golf courses in the county, which
is a much better number to work with and they were all spread out. My next
issue did not take much longer to come across and that was dealing with cities.
Outagamie County only has a couple major cities, and those are the only ones
which came up with the cities data set. To fix this problem I imported the
places data set and performed a query to just get cities in Outagamie County,
therefore giving me many more cities to work with. My next issue I came across was not being
able to plan for a course to be built on non-park land because the data for
that was not available and would take a much longer time to manually find a
location for a golf course. So I had to settle for just the use of the parks.
The next issue I had to overcome was the parks not taking into account what was
already on the park land. I know from my background knowledge that Appleton’s
Memorial Park has an ice rink and many softball fields on it that many youth
teams use, along with those they also use the hill in the park for the finish
line of a 5k race and use the manmade lake in the park for firework shows. As
for Shiocton’s Lake Park there is a manmade lake and beach there that
contributes great amounts of revenue to the city as well as baseball fields
where local teams play at. The last issue I came across was the not current
data sets I worked with.
My
project came up with two ideal locations for a new 9-hole golf course
Overall
I was greatly impressed with this project because we were able to choose our
own idea for the project and got to go anyway with it that we wanted. If I was
able to change anything about this project I would probably change how much
time we were given to do it. I think if we were given much more time we could
go into much more detail and go out and get real data for the project. I know
for my question I would be able go into land availability much deeper and maybe
contact other people about land use, but that may be way too much to handle in
GIS 1 and more for an actual job or research project. The only real challenges
I came across was using the wrong tool and then having to restart that step.
