Several of our lab exercises will use tools provided by the Spatial Analyst extension, but you might need to configure your licensing options to turn Spatial Analyst on. This quick video shows where to go to turn on the Spatial Analyst license.
Here we see how to use the Raster Calculator in ArcGIS Pro to calculate Environmental Envelopes for the Mexican spotted owl. Environmental envelopes are among the most simple and intuitive ways of identifying suitable habitat for a species.
In this exercise we’ll take a look at Minimum Convex Polygons, sometimes just referred to as Convex Hulls or MCPs, which are an excellent and intuitive way to draw a polygon that captures all the area used by an animal. MCPs provide a good estimate of an animal’s home range, as well as ways to examine the ways an animal may use different parts of the landscape for different purposes. In this example, we’ll look at some radio telemetry locations taken on two Mexican spotted owls in Arizona, and see how much land they tend to occupy year-round, and how they use the land differently in the day and night, and how they behave different during breeding and non-breeding season.
Here we see how to use Kernel Densities in ArcGIS Pro to estimate where a species spends its time. We see how higher densities can be used to identify the regions that are most important to the animal, and we see how we can select different subsets of points and learn how the animal behaves differently at different times. And we see some issues with the Kernel Density tool in that it can be difficult to know what values to use for important parameters. We'll also try out the Contour tool, a Mathematical Logical Operator tool, and a conversion tool for converting rasters to polygons.
