October 26, 2004

To: Dr. Lawrence Estaville

From: Geoland Services Company

Subject: Progress Report of Land Use Project in Williamson County

Purpose

The purpose of this memo is to inform you of the progress that has been made on the land use project that was proposed to you on September 21. This memo will contain a review of the project that was proposed to you and any changes that have deviated from the original proposal. This memo will also inform you of the work Geoland Services Company has completed, what we are currently working on, and the work that will be completed before the project concludes. This memo will also include any problems associated with the current and completed tasks.

Project Description

Geoland Services Company proposed a project that would locate areas within Williamson County that should be preserved as green space. The basis for this project is the tremendous growth occurring in Williamson County. We proposed a two part analysis that would use a vector and raster analysis to locate these areas. The proposed deliverable included a report of how the project was conducted and the results found from the study, an informative poster containing maps of the results found in our study area, CD’s with the data used to obtain the results, a power-point presentation, and a website.

Revised Proposal

Since the original proposal date, Geoland Services Company has made some revisions to the land use project of Williamson County. Through the course of the analysis completed thus far, we have realized that we are capable of expanding on the project. The analysis that will be conducted on Williamson County to locate green space can include other areas of land use without changing the project’s timeline or costs. Geoland Services Company is now proposing a land suitability analysis for green space, agriculture, and future development. The reason for this expansion is the analysis and resources needed to locate green space can be used in a similar manner to find areas suitable for agriculture or further development. Locating land suitable for agriculture and future development will actually assist the original proposal of finding areas suitable for green space. The designation of land for specific uses is always highly debated. We found that selecting specific areas for green space could easily be contested. If we locate areas of agriculture and development as well, the project would have justification for each selection and a mode of comparison. Instead of having an arbitrary selection of green space, the deliverable will have a statement that shows why we chose areas for particular land use and why each area identified was not classified as suitable for other types of land use. These results will be obtained by having distinct criteria for each of the three land uses we are identifying.

Scope

The project will include visual tools including maps, a power point, and a website, as well as a report that describes the research and analysis conducted to complete the project. This project will provide recommendations for land use in Williamson County by identifying suitable areas for agriculture, green space, and future development.

Tasks

• Develop criteria for each of the land use categories (agriculture, green space, development)
• Collect data needed for project
• Re-project data to align
• Apply criteria to vector analysis
• Rasterize all data
• Apply criteria to create raster suitability models
• Provide visualization of results
• Create report of results

Work Completed

I. Data

All of the data necessary for this project has been collected. The data has been re- projected into UTM Zone 14. An analysis mask was applied using the Williamson County boundary to exclude erroneous data. The data is now ready for analysis.

II. Agriculture

The criteria for locating prime farmland have been defined. The criteria will include types of soil and area availability. Slope, drainage, amount of topsoil, and parent rock has already been included in the soil classifications. The types of crops cultivated in Williamson County and the soils associated with these crops is the basis for the soil types that will be used for locating suitable lands for agriculture. Forty-four percent of Williamson County has been identified as prime farmland; however a great portion of this land has already been developed on. This is a growing trend in Williamson County so identifying large areas that contain soils classified as prime farmland is vital in the decision process of land use in Williamson County.

Problems: The only problem associated with agriculture thus far was identifying criteria that would yield justifiable results. There are many elements that go into the identification of land suitable for agriculture. The problem was how to select the components that would identity justifiable areas suitable for agriculture from the limited data available to us. Another issue that had to be considered was the existing conditions and trends. Land use is highly dictated by economic output in relation to availability. Much of the land that arguably is suitable for agriculture has already been developed. If this is common practice than it is difficult to define areas as agricultural as opposed to other land uses that might generate more economic value. The necessity of this project is to find areas that truly should be used for agriculture based on their quality and availability thus reasoning that this land is highly suited for agriculture and its availability supersedes other land uses. To accomplish this goal, criteria had to be created that met these specific purposes. This problem was overcome after referencing Soil Survey of Williamson County Texas that specifically identified the prime soils that are present in Williamson County. Identifying large areas with these valuable soils will be recommended as suitable for agriculture only.

III. Recreation Areas

The criteria for locating suitable recreation areas has been defined as such:

i. soils that are not conducive to development and are possibly occasionally flooded

ii. land use and land cover categorizations that are designated for recreation areas, wildlife habitat and flood plains.

The soils shapefile was downloaded from the Texas Natural Resources Information System (TNRIS at www.tnris.state.tx.us) and had some problems with area and perimeter in the attributes. Many of the records showed a very small perimeter and zero area. Obviously, any parcel that has a perimeter must have area as well. I downloaded X-Tools from the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI at www.esri.com), and installed it into ArcView 3.3. I added the soils and land use/land cover (retrieved from GeoCommunity at www.geocommunity.com) shapefiles to the ArcView session and ran X-Tools to calculate the area and perimeter. The result gave me shapefiles with good numbers in the area and perimeter fields as well as providing the area in acres and hectares.

Using the soils layer and information taken from the Soil Survey of Williamson County, Texas (United States Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service, January, 1983), several classes of soils have been identified as suitable for recreation areas. The soil types were entered into an excel spreadsheet and given a classification of 1 for soil types that require little preparation or amendment for recreation development, 2 for soils that require moderate amendments, and 3 for those soils that require extensive amendment and modification for use in recreation. Five categories of recreation are defined; campground, playground, picnic areas, golf fairways and paths and trails. Each soil type listed in the Soil Survey was given a rating for each of the recreation types and the ratings for each soil type were averaged. Any soil scoring 2 or less in the overall rating is determined to be suitable for recreation development with those soils scoring greater than two are deemed inappropriate. The land use/land coverage shapefile will be used to see where the appropriate soils are located and how much overlap exists between the current land use/land cover and the soils suitable for recreation development.

*The group website is up and running, however, it is still under one of the group member’s website. Space has not been allocated for GeoLand Services Company to post their website on Valverde yet. The website is still somewhat under construction, but there are links to some of the member’s professional websites as well as a link to the Company’s proposal for the current project. Future work on the website includes further developing the individual group member’s professional webpages, adding more text about the project, and the addition of biographical sketches for each member.*

Work Scheduled

I. Agriculture

The established criteria for locating areas suitable for agriculture will be applied to the vector data sets. Once all of the data has been analyzed in vector format, the data will be rasterized to create a suitability model. Once in raster format, a reclassification of the data will be performed. Raster calculator will then calculate the new classes that will produce the agricultural suitability model. This model will then be combined with the suitability models of development and green space. The data will need to undergo another reclassification so that an overall suitability model can be created that identifies each of the three land uses without overlap. Once the analysis is finished, visualization of the project will be created and refined to present our results.

II. Recreation

Suitable sites for recreation will be determined by cross referencing the soils shapefile with the land use/land cover shapefile and the MS Excel spreadsheet rating all soils in Williamson County for suitability. A map will be produced showing which sites should be considered for designation as green-space and those that should be actively developed into some recreational area.