Week 7 Site Selection

Week 7's assignment was to come up with a scenario of our own regarding site selection. I chose to work a parish in Louisiana.
Parish commissioners wanted to locate parcels that could potentially be purchased and developed into a park or recreation area.
The criteria:
Funds allowed for approximately 400 acs to be purchased. I brought in the parcel layer and ran a calc'd acre field. I then broke it down in to 6 size categories. I added an additional field to note the rank of 1-6 so I could run a merge as converting to raster didn't work without that.
I then brought in Gap data and to look for land that was suited for a park. Primarily to exclude water areas and highly developed areas.
I looked at roads to allow for accessibility. I ran a 100 ft buffer on all roads. My ranking was within 100 ft and outside 100 ft.
I think used the only recreation area that already exists to run a distance. As we might want to place a park away from an existing park for greater opportunities.
Running analysis:
I first ran all criteria as equal. The results were not good as I suspected they would be.
I then ranked the parcel data as the highest (50% weight), gap data (30%), roads and proximity to existing wma (10% each). This allowed for a better result.
You can certainly play with these rankings as well as add a few more criteria to narrow your searchs. Once you find some parcels that would fit your needs, running another series of analysis could be done to decide the uses within those ideal sites. This would then help with determining which site is better as well as what to develop in the site (i.e. boat ramps, bike trails, etc.
Enjoyed the exercise.