In order to determine a suitable location for an eco-tourism resort, a comprehensive dataset needed to be acquired for Vancouver Island.  Such a dataset was available in the Spatial Information Systems Computer Lab at Simon Fraser University.  Originally the dataset was obtained from www.gis.luco.gov.bc.ca/slup/vanisle.html , the BC Government Land Use Coordination Office web site.  The dataset pertains to the Vancouver Island Land Use Plan that was born from the Commission on Resources and Environment (CORE) process within BC to provide land use planning recommendations throughout the province, while taking into account both resource and environmental issues.  A summary of the Vancouver Island Land Use Plan can be found at www.luco.gov.bc.ca/slupinbc/vanisle/toc.htm .

        The dataset had previously been converted into Idrisi format and contained both raster and vector coverages of various attributes of Vancouver Island.  In order to perform the spatial analysis required, many of the original coverages needed to be manipulated in various ways to achieve the preliminary coverages required for the project.

        The original layers used included: landuse, CORE landuse, DEM, major roads, endangered species, hunting, anadromous fish streams/rivers, hydrolines and tourism capability.  The Endangered and Threatened  Wildlife Species map shown here was only available in vector format, and thus needed to be converted to raster in order to perform the spatial analysis techniques discussed later.  The major roads and hydrolines layers needed to be reformatted from vector to raster as well.

        The original database did not include a coverage of all of the dominant water features (ocean, wetlands, lakes and rivers) on Vancouver Island, a layer that was necessary to properly evaluate the environmental concerns of the proposed development of an eco-tourism resort.  Attributes from one coverage needed to be extracted and combined with attributes from a different coverage. The dataset's landuse coverage (shown below) provided the necessary information on the locations of both wetlands and lakes.  It was assigned new values in order to display only the required attributes, and was overlaid with the anadromous fish streams/rivers coverage that I reclassified to display only the ocean and streams/rivers.  The overlay (OR) process subsequently produced a boolean map of all four of the water features, for use in finding a site location for the eco-tourism resort.

        Many of the other original coverages used needed to be reclassified and assigned new values in similar ways in order to prepare them for use in the project.  Also, in order to acquire a slope layer for the project area, the DEM map was applied a slope surface analysis.  These manipulations are all shown on the cartographic model in the following section on methodology.

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