Developing a model of any kind can either be fun and exciting, or it can be tedious and depressing. As with anything that has to do with GIS and ArcDesktop, frustration comes with the territory. Once you’ve come to the point where you want to swing a nicely polished sledge hammer right down on your GIS bearing computer in order to deliver the sequential blow after hours of plugging away only to find out that you have to restart somewhere because of a little step you forgot to take, or some unforeseen file corruption etc etc… then you know you’re starting to get somewhere. Here’s a glimpse at about half of my Table of Contents in ArcMap.

This is the simple model that prepares the data for integration into a larger model that runs multiple weighted overlay analyses with several parameter differences to create layers that represent numerous possibilities for camas habitat suitability.

The fun side of this necessary task has been connecting camas ecology with the data I’ve been processing in ArcMap. It’s an amazing thing to watch an idea blossom in my mind and then manifest itself as a colorful and vibrant map surface that represents the possible locations for the habitat suitable for this precious plant species… and then another version with slightly different weights for the variables being used in the analysis to create yet another colorfully represented map surface. There will be more details on those at a later time…