Mountain Top Removal - Prepare Week

Special Topics - Project 2 Week 1

Mountain Top Removal (MTR) is a method of mining for coal that destroys a mountaintop or ridgeline.  This project will explore MTR in the Appalachian Coal Region of West Virginia using data and methods provided by SkyTruth.org to investigate evidence of human-caused changes to landscape cause by MTR using remotely sensed data.  Since this is such a large area to cover, the project was divided into four groups.  I am part of Group 3.

Starting with four Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) that were merged using the Raster to New Mosaic tool and clipped to the Study Area with Extract by Mask tool, a hydrology dataset was created.  This was accomplished using the following Spatial Analyst Hydrology tools:

• Fill - to modify the raster to prevent water flow from pooling up anywhere in the Study Area.
• Flow Direction - to assign each pixel a value representing the direction of water flow across that cell.
• Flow Accumulation - to calculate the total number of other cells that flow into it.
• Con - defines the threshold of flow accumulation values that qualify something as a stream.  Prior to running this tool 1% of the pixels of the original clipped DEM needed to be calculated in order to quantify which conditions a pixel must meet in order to be classified as a stream.  
• Stream to Feature - creates polyline vector feature from the Con tool output raster.
• Basin - delineates the drainage areas in the raster, giving each a unique value
• Raster to Polygon - creates a polygon shapefile from the raster.

This is the basemap that will be worked from in the upcoming Analyze and Report weeks.  Also a part of this week's assignment was to create a story map of the MTR process and a Story Map Journal to be filled in over the next couple weeks.  These are the links for both:

Story Map:  http://arcg.is/2daFw7K

Story Map Journal:  http://arcg.is/2daNCgz