Lab #5

Finding Best Path to Optimize Likelihood of
Encountering Tigers or Tiger Signs

You would like to find the best path between two locations at either end of Huay Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary in Thailand, which will optimize the likelihood that you will encounter tigers or tiger signs. The likelihood of encountering tigers at any given location is a function of distance to rivers, distance from the perimeter of the wildlife sanctuary, distance from roads, and distance from villages. The likelihood of tigers increases the closer you are to a stream and decreases the closer you are to villages, roads, and the wildlife boundary.

You will be able to set the distance at which these factors have a negligible effect. The fall off function used is e^-dk.

Steps to running the application:

1. On a pc, make out the unix scratch directory
2. From the scratch directory, copy the entire amy directory to your U: drive
3. On the U: drive, rename "amy" to "scratch"
4. Open the lab5.apr project located in u:\scratch\lab_5\export\.
5. Set the working directory in ArcView
6. Click on the Path button
7. Enter the values in the table below for the Parameters for "Optimized Tiger Sighting Path" window that appears

		distance (m)	weight	effect on the # of tigers
Run 1	villages	5000	1	decrease
	roads	5000	1	decrease
	boundary	5000	1	decrease
	rivers	5000	1	increase
Run 2	villages	6000	8	decrease
	roads	5000	2	decrease
	boundary	10000	3	decrease
	rivers	4000	1	increase
Run 3	villages	10000	1	decrease
	roads	5000	7	decrease
	boundary	3000	10	decrease
	rivers	7000	3	increase

Final Products:

• Create maps of your output. Make sure to include all the cartographic elements.
• Write up in the form of the Cartographic Model.
  Discuss your results.
  If you were doing this project for real, how would you select the themes, distances, and weights for determining the optimal path? Which additional themes might you include?