THE SCENARIO

You are working forsmall consulting company called Geographic Intelligence Services and have been asked to do some work for Megacorp, an international Venture Capital company. Somewhat unsettled by the recent financial market, Megacorp have decided to invest heavily in the basic means of production, agricultural land. Their Agricultural Investment Expert has targeted SW Western Australia and has commissioned you to carry out a preliminary analysis.

In order not to warn the market you will be using only data that are freely available. Your task is to obtain preliminary information about areas that meet the company’s ideas of suitable places. You are to present a report to Megacorp outlining your findings. Depending on the outcomes of this initial phase of the project, and your ability to produce these outcomes, you may (hopefully!) be asked to tender for the next phase of the project.

At this early stage of the project, you (in consultation with the Agricultural Investment Expert) have been able to source some data as follows: (actual data sources are provided for your information)

From Geoscience Australia’s 1:1,000,000 spatial data base, the following shapefiles:

 Major_towns_GDA.shp, Major townsin the area of interest

 Roads_GDA.shp, Major roads in the area of interest

 Rail_GDA.shp, Rail lines in the area of interest

 watercourses_GDA.shp, rivers and streamsin the area of interest

From the Western Australian Land Information system, Via the Shared Land information Platform (SLIP)

 soil_zones_GDA.shp, Broad level soilzone mapping for the area of interest

 DEC_GDA.shp, all land in the area of interest that is registered as the responsibility of the Department of Environment and conservation

 wa_rainfall.shp, (Rainfallshapefile represents 30‐year average of WA rainfall, processed from BOM)

The Agricultural Investments Expert (Dr Brat Kartoffeln from Megacorp’s European office) has also provided you with the following

 study_area.shp, The study area as defined by Megacorp

 Places.txt, Minor towns within the west of Western Australia

 SoilTypes.txt, An interpretation, by Dr Kartoffeln, of the major soil types in the zones shown in

Soil_zones_GDA.shp, based on published data and his somewhat shaky grasp of soil science

The criteria that Megacorp has determined for the preliminary study are as shown below:

Land must be:

 Within 120 km of any of the ports of Albany, Bunbury or Kwinana;

 Be in a zone with soils categorized as either “Sandy duplex” or “Colluvial”;

 Be in neither State Forest or National Park;

 Be in an area where the rainfall is greater than or equal to 600 mm per year.

THE REPORT

In your report carry out the following GIS steps and answer the required questions.

1. Examine the various data layers provided and report their coordinate systems(including the major properties).

Tabulate the data for ease of comparison.

2. What isthe difference(s) between GDA1994 and GDA2020? Why is GDA2020 superior to GDA1994?

3. What are the major steps used to prepare a geodatabase for this project? What is the name of your geodatabase? What are the feature datasets and feature classes used in the geodatabase? Provide a screenshot.

4. How many fields are in the file named ‘places.txt’? What processing steps are used to convert the text file to a shape file?

5. How many soil zones are obtained when converting text file (SoilType.txt) to a shape file? If extracting soil ID 259 and creating a separate data layer, what GIS step(s) are essential in the conversion process?

6. Describe the operation to obtain Rainfall ≥600 mm.

7. To satisfy the criteria ‘Be in neither State Forest or National Park’, what GIS operation was used? Provide a short explanation.

8. What is the Railroad feature type? In order to derive Multiple Railroad from the layer named Rail_GDA.shp, what operation is required? How many Multiple railroads are retrieved with the operation?

9. Develop a structure chart for the work, revealing the steps used to derive the final suitable areas (lands).

10. Produce a map, showing locations of the possible areas greater than 10 km2 . Show all cartographic elements in the map