Cost and Preference Criteria
The cost/preference
factors that will affect the selection process include: the slope of the
land, the distance from major roads, the distance from hunting areas, the
tourism capability of the land, the CORE landuse recommendations for the
area, and the distance from unsightly features such as logged areas, agricultural
land and urban areas. The constraints, areas that I deemed to be
totally unsuitable for the site, include: hunting areas, areas within the
viewshed of hydrolines, protected, settled, multiple resource water and
agricultural lands, and those areas not containing mature forests.
The slope
of the land is important in regards to building the resort--the steeper
the slope, the higher the development costs. After creating the slope
layer from the DEM, the module FUZZY was used to create a continuous
suitability map (slopefuzz) with values representing the degree of suitability
of each pixel's slope. A decreasing sigmoidal function was used to
represent how the suitability of slope decreased as slope increased from
zero, and how slopes above fifteen degrees were relatively unsuitable.
The
DISTANCE
module was used to create a distance from major roads map (roaddist) from
the rasterized coverage of major roads. The resort must be close
enough to major roads so that tourists can locate the site without any
great complications, and traveling mostly on major roads will reduce the
travel time from the major city centers on Vancouver Island--Victoria and
Nanaimo. Proximity to a major road will also reduce potential costs
of secondary road building and the environmental destruction that this
entails. However, since the goal of the eco-tourism resort is to
be amongst nature, it must be far enough away so visitors can not hear
the sounds of passing cars or honking horns, or be able to reach a main
road on a day hike. With this in mind, when creating a fuzzy suitability
coverage, I used a decreasing j-shaped function with control point c =
3500 m and d = 10,000 m to show that suitability is highest at 3500 m from
a major road and half-way between perfectly suitable and unsuitable at
10,000m.
BUFFER was used to create a 1000 m buffer around all hunting areas on the boolean hunting layer. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, the buffer provides a reasonable sound barrier so that gunfire will not be heard at the resort. The second reason is for safety. The last thing that you want at a tourism destination is someone going for a hike into hunting territory and getting mistaken for wildlife and shot. This coverage is the hunting constraint (huntingcon) and will not allow the site selection to be within the hunting area and the surrounding buffer. As well, the boolean hunting layer was used to create a distance from hunting areas coverage and finally a fuzzy suitability layer (huntingfuzz). Huntingfuzz was created in order to increase suitability as the distance from the hunting areas increased. Using an increasing sigmoidal function in FUZZY, suitability begins to increase at 2000 m until leveling off at maximum suitability at 10,000 m. 10,000 m was used to represent the furthest distance reached on a day hike (making the hike a 20 km as the crow flies round trip back to the resort).
Hydrolines are another feature that would take away from the remote "at home with nature" fealing of the resort. Therefore, I used VIEWSHED so that all areas within sight (up to 10 km away) of hydrolines be constrained from the site location.
A boolean map of unsightly areas (logged, urban and agricultural lands) was created using ASSIGN. I decided that it would be best for the atmosphere of the resort if these "unsightly" features were far enough away so that they could be sheltered from view by the surrounding forest and difficult to reach on a day hike. DISTANCE followed by FUZZY was used to accomplish this and determine suitability ratings. An increasing sigmoidal was used with control point a = 2000 m and b = 10,000 m. Suitability therefore increases from a distance of 2000 m and reaches a maximum suitability at 10,000 m and beyond.
In order to achieve the desired environment for the resort, it was necessary for the site to be located in a mature forest. To accomplish this a constraint map (matforestcon) was created from the original landuse layer to limit site location to these areas.
A landuse
constraints map (core_lucon) was reclassed from a CORE land use recommendations
map (core_lu), so that agricultural, protected, settled, and multi-resource
water areas be omitted from the site selection. The remaining possible
landuse classifications from the core_lu map were given new values to correspond
to their degree of suitability. Multi- resource crown land was assigned
the highest suitability (255) since tourism was noted as one of the multi-resource
uses for the land in the Vancouver Island Land Use Plan report. The
land could be acquired from the government by emphasizing the high environmental
standards, the educational benefits and economic benefits of eco-tourism.
The multi-resource private land was also assigned a high suitability rating
(225), slightly less than the rating for crown land because of the private
sectors interests for the land might lean more towards forestry and mining.
The regionally significant Clayoquot / Special Management area was rated
at 175 because the area's old growth forests have received considerable
global media exposure that could possibly translate into an increased interest
in the resort, however a permit to operate on the land could be difficult
to obtain as the land is under special management. The other regionally
significant lands were rated slightly lower (150). Proposed protected
land and aquaculture areas have relatively low suitability (75 and 50),
since the proposed protected land would be difficult to gain access to
because the government is attempting to make it a protected area.
Aquacultural areas are not totally unsuitable because they do offer an
opportunity for tourists to gain insight into an aquacultural operation
and there is the opportunity for ocean activities (ex. whale watching).