Lab 2

Mike Kershner Project Review
So, just to see if I have things straight, you are planning on looking at the urban growth areas around Mount Vernon and analyzing what it would mean, economicaly, for the residents of those areas to be annexed by the city. Your analysis is meant to include differences in taxes and utility fees between the city and the urban growth areas as they are now. It seems to like this will be a useful project for the city and the people living in those areas.

This project seems very doable. You have access to all the shapefiles you need and it's just a matter of putting it all together and doing some queries.

If one of you is in 453 it might be a good idea to convert your shapefiles to coverages and create topology for everything. You probably don't have to do that, but it might be cool. I like how your project is tiered.

The only question I have is how will you determine if a septic system will leak or not from aerial photographs and shapefiles?

Overall, it seems like you have everything well thought out and ready to go on a project that will be pretty useful when it's done.

Steve Lardy Project Review

Wow, that project description was very detailed. Seems like you got everything covered. To summarize, for the sake of my grade, you and Kevin are planning on doing a land use classification for the Kenai River Watershed and then overlaying an ownership layer to determine which local, state and federal agencies have jurisdiction over the land. From there, you will overlaying a known salmon spawing habitat layer to determine which agencies are in charge of those areas. By doing this you hope to force those agencies to act to protect those areas as required by state and federal law.

This project sounds doable, but like a lot of work. To part that I see taking the most time is the land use classification, unless you can find one that has already been done. Along those lines, I suggest you use ERDAS Imagine if you are familiar with it. Imagine is a remote sensing program that can do classifications of images based on the brightness values of the pixels. The idea is that pixel of the same land cover type will have similar brightness values. ERDAS also enables you to use all parts of the specturm captured by whatever satellite got the images you're using. It might be useful for what you are planning on doing. I can't wait to see your results.

Corey Long Project Review

Once again for the sake of my grade, your proposal is to determine where economically depressed areas in major Pacific Northwest cities in order to direct economic development efforts to those areas that need them the most. You will develop different methodologies, assumedly based off different combinations of census data, for these different cities because economic conditions are different in each city. These methodologies will allow you to tailor you're analysis to the specific conditions of the city.

I have a couple of questions. 1) Why not use the different methodologies on the same city if you're interested in comparing methodolgies? 2) What agency controls access to the census data at the neighborhood level? It seems that this project would be more powerful if you could identify neighborhoods that needed these Urban Enterprise Centers.

This project seems very straightforward. Although I'm unsure of how you will develop your methodologies, but I'm sure you have a good idea of that. Good luck.