The District of North Vancouver


Problems and Errors

    I experienced several problems within the project.  Firstly, I found it extremely difficult to do an analysis on the criteria of the development areas.  I was ultimately attempting to do an object based analysis of adjacency with these areas.  Because this is an object based analysis, it proved difficult to produce the result of only development zones adjacent to multiresidential zones for the final analysis.  When I completed the final cost distance surface from multiresidential zones, the image simply reproduced all of the development areas.  I double checked by adding the vector layer of multiresidential areas on top of the image in order to determine if all selected areas were indeed beside multiresidential zones; not all of them were.  It probably would have been easier to simply have made a distance surface of multiresidential areas and then reclassed it as a Boolean image showing a 100m radius around the zones.  I would have to include this buffer as no development zones would be included within the multiresidential zones.

    This leads to the next problem I experienced.  It was difficult to tell what type of development was infact slated for development zones It was simply called comprehensive development, which it could be assumed means multi-use development.  However, it was not clear if land that was zoned as single-family dwellings and multi-family dwellings did in fact have some areas that are to be developed for those purposes.  Just because they are zoned as such does not necessarily mean that they are already built upon.  Therefore, I chose not to include these areas in the analysis.

    I also had technical difficulties in rasterizing the schools layer.  The reference system would not change for me and I eventually had to abandon it.  Therefore I was forced to digitize the layer and rasterize that.  It is safe to assume that the locations of these schools are merely in the vacinity of their actual locations.  I also included a school in the City of North Vancouver, which is not a part of the study.  I accounted for this in the database by specifying none in each of the fields for that school.  The creeks layer also presented some problems in that it did not differentiate between land and ocean in the layer.  Therefore, ocean was included as potential area for development.  Of course this ultimately did not affect my analysis as the ocean did not meet any of the other criteria.  While there was a descriptor of ocean in the database, it only referred to the coastline, not the actual body of water.  The same was true for lakes.


References

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