GIS 5100 Module 1 Least Cost Paths

The second part of Module 1 had us learn about and practice creating least cost paths and corridors. Creating least cost paths is a very involved process with many steps and complex operations to carry out. Cost surfaces need to calculated and various operations with rasters need to be done. Ranking of data used in cost surface analysis is vital to cost paths. Every part of the area being analyzed must have some cost (rank) associated with a cell in order to carry out the necessary cost analysis. A lack of data in some areas will lead to holes in the analysis. 

The map below shows a corridor between two national forest areas that is to be used by black bears. The corridor was derived by using elevation, land cover and road data/inputs. The input data was first reclassified in order to rank features and then combined. The combined data was used to create a cost surface. The cost surface was repeated with both a source and a destination in order to prepare for a corridor analysis. The corridor analysis combined the the cost surfaces and created the actual corridor with various ranked values. The least probable corridor values were removed and only the most suitable corridor area was mapped. 

The area mapped as corridor looks to be wide and still crosses lots of roads. It is likely that the weights of certain input factors need adjusting or perhaps more or different constraints need to be included in order to narrow down a corridor and make it more realistic.