GIS Programming project demo video Group9 Fall 2023

This project report proposes a suitable location for a new park in Harris County, Texas. This location is selected using GIS analysis considering the given specific criteria and requirements. The motivation for this project came from the adverse impacts caused by pollution in the regions of dense population in Harris County. The epicenter of the major pollution was from the regions of Greater Houston due to this region's high population and infrastructure growth along with higher rates of petroleum processing units. Spatial modeling and GIS visualization can be used to assess likely outcomes of conservation decisions [1]. Both the spatiotemporal variability of air pollution and individual daily movement patterns in exposure and health risk assessment [2]. Fossil fuel-based emissions are a major source of urban air pollution and have been associated with a variety of adverse health outcomes [3]. The combination of GIS and logical tools proved to be successful as a help for stakeholders involved in the decision-making process [4]. Visualizing natural features prone to disasters from the oil sector spatially helps in environmental management with records of changes in affected areas, and also furnishes information on the pace at which resource extraction affects nature [5]. This solution of creating community parks allow for common recreational spaces for growing populations in the county and more spaces for safe outdoor activities enhancing the health of inhabitants. The goal of this project is to convert undeveloped land into a community park based on parameters that are deemed suitable for the park and the Harris County community. This helps to alleviate the issue of health hazards due to pollution for outdoor activities in the future.

The objective of this project is to build a new community park by converting undeveloped land categorized as regions that have the least air pollution with a size between 30 to 100 acres. Because the new park is for recreational use, the location of the park should be at least 2 miles away from all toxic chemical facilities. In addition, the proposed park should not be close to existing parks and maintain atleast half a miles distance from the existing park. To benefit more residents, the new community park should be in a neighborhood with a population of at least ten thousand residents. For this given task, GIS analysis is the best option as the task requires analysis of geographic locations along with their attributes. The project requires all the generated maps to be in the projection: UTM Zone 14N. A full-featured professional desktop GIS application from Esri called ArcGIS Pro was used to analyze and process the data. A Python-based toolbox was developed to achieve this goal.