Module 6: Suitability and Least-Cost Analysis Part 1

    
    For the first part of this week's lab, I created suitability models and used those to rate locations as if I was a GIS analyst for a property developer. In total, five rasters/inputs were included in the analysis: landcover, soils, slope, rivers, and roads. I started by editing some of the rasters/inputs, so they would meet the needs of the project. This included creating a slope layer from the DEM raster and generating the euclidean distance rasters for the road and rivers layers. Next, I reclassified each input raster and assigned a suitability rating between 1 and 5 for certain value ranges.  Lastly, I used the weighted overlay tool to generate a raster that took into account the suitability rating from each input and generated an overlay suitability rating for each pixel within the area of interest. I started with an equal weighting for each input raster (20% for each raster) and then I generated two alternative weighted overlay outputs with altered weighting to explore how that impacts the final product. The weighting for the alternate products is listed below. See the layout below for a comparison of the weighted overlay outputs created from each set of weights.