GIS Concepts

1. Data Collection, Type, and Sources
a. Four DEM's (raster) covering the White River National Forest Boudaries were downloaded from the USGS Seamless server website. http://seamless.usgs.gov/

b. Soil Survey (vector), WRNF Boundary (polygon), & roads (polyline) were downloaded from the White River National Forest website.http://www.fs.usda.gov/

c. Prism data for maximum temperature (raster) and monthly precipitation (raster) was obtained from the PRISM webiste. http://www.prism.oregonstate.edu

d. Stand Survey (point) data was collected during 2009 and 2010 and digitized by M. Dudley.

e. Data (raster) for the Colorado Vegetation Classification Project (CVCP) was downloaded from the CVCP website. http://ndis.nrel.colostate.edu/coveg/

f. Data (polygon) for United States Forest Service Aerial Survey was downloaded from the USFS R2 website.  www.fs.fed.us/r2/resources/fhm/aerialsurvey

2. Data Conversion

a. Mosaic of DEM's was performed to produce WR_DEM.

b. Aspect was reclassified using WR_DEM to three natural breaks using the spatial analyst tool.  Aspect was classified by North, Southeast and Western facing directions.

c. Elevation was reclassfied from DEM into 2 categories; greater than 3000 meters and below 3000 meters.

d. Soil Survey data was converted to raster format for processing. A non-spatial table was created in our aspen .gdb and then populated with information from the White River National Forest Soil Survey Dictionary. The data for soil description was joined to the raster layer through the "map_unit" fields.

e. Gridded Prism data for maximum daily temperature and monthly precipitation for the months June - Sepetmber 1999-2010 were downloaded as .gz files and renamed to .asc files. Projection for raster were defined as UTM NAD 83 Zone 13N. Layers were clipped to Colorado and averaged across years by month.

f. Point data for stand survey plots weredigitized to shape files.

g. Gridded data for CVCP was downloaded by watershed and converted to a shapefile. Map units with codes that included aspen were selected and exported as an aspen vegetation layer.

h. Shapefiles for aspen covertype from aerial survey data for years 2006-2009 were clipped to the southern White River National Forest Boundary.

3. Data Projection
All coverages and rasters were reprojected to UTM Zone 13N.

4. Map Generation
Symbology was selected with cartography standards to accurately reflect the goals for location and base maps. A standard template was used to derive all base maps. We used a map template developed by ESRI with layers for the United States for a portion of our location map.