Monday, April 15, 2013

Project Update

After meeting with Professor Galford last week I feel a lot better about this project. The hardest part for me is going to be getting the data and manipulating it for use in Dinamica. I have been in contact with Joe Roman to get some data on sharks but so far I don't have anything. I plan on contacting Ellen Marsden, who is the professor for two of my other courses and hopefully she will be able to help me access some data on sharks, whales, or some kind of marine fish. Once I get that data I will probably have to do some work in Excel and ArcMap to make it something useable. I also discussed converting the data into some equations to be used in a Calculate Map functor in my model. I'm hoping to build a model with 2-3 input maps, a calculate map functor containing name maps for each of these load maps, and then a save map. It shouldn't have to be too complicated, which would be ideal since the work with the data should be enough trouble on its own. Then I will have to do some kind of comparison. I have no quite worked out how I'm going to do that, but Prof. Galford and I discussed splitting up the data points I use in my model, and only using a select portion so that I can compare my output to the other data points I did not use. Not quite the exact same way we did the comparison of landuse a few lessons back, but I guess with different data you must utilize different methods of analysis. Still, this will all kind of depend on the amount and quality of the data I get. So that's kind of where I am, I have a strong grip on what I want to do and how I think I'm going to do it. However the most challenging part is what I must tackle next: THE DATA. I think I will definitely have to meet with Galford again and likely with Joe Roman, Ellen Marsden, and whoever else could help me figure out where to get it, how to manipulate it, and how to use it.

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