Transmission Line Route Manatee-Sarasota County Line

06May2020, UWF GIS4043/L

Carlee Hoagland

Project Background

Problem: Minimizing the impact on homes, parcels, schools, and the environment with a transmission line from Manatee county to Sarasota county

Objectives: 

  • Create a map that shows the homes, schools, and daycare's within the proximity of the site
  • Create a map that shows what conservation lands would be impacted by the construction and placement of the line
  • Find the length of the line

Data required:

  • Major roads in area
  • County boundaries
  • Conservation lands
  • The ideal route
  • Aerial view to see homes, schools, and daycare buildings
  • Data on where the schools, daycare's, and homes are located in the county

Why GIS?

   ArcGIS allows the opportunity to clearly see and manipulate features as needed to achieve the results we need. It has the tools and analysis capabilities to answer the questions we needed to find the best route 

Study Area

The map (above) shows the impacted area in blue, the line itself in dark pink, the impacted homes as yellow dots, the roads in light pink, the schools and daycare's are the red, purple, and green dots, and finally the county parcels in faded pink and purple

Analysis and Results

Questions That Drove Analysis

  1. What environmentally sensitive land will be impacted by the transmission line? -Typically in FL damaging wetlands, and even dry conservation lands requires a fee of sorts, or the replacement/creation of the same type of land elsewhere nearby. We need to know how much if any land will be impacted.
  2. What homes will be impacted by the transmission line? 
  3. What schools (if any) will be impacted by the transmission line? -Ideally we want minimal impact to homes and schools because that tends to for contempt amongst the residents, and we want to residents to want this for their own good
  4. What will the length of the transmission line be? -We want to achieve the goal of the transmission line with minimal disruption of land, community, and budget

Analysis

Completing this analysis entailed using a variety of geoprocessing tools, and keeping close track of what was done. To start we got our base layers of roads, county lines, and the preferred corridor. From here we will add provided shapefiles of conservation lands and use the intersect tool to find what lands fall inside the corridor. Using the attribute table for the resulting feature we can find the acreage. Next we will use the buffer to create a 400ft buffer around the corridor and then use the aerial views of the area provided to create a feature class that will show all homes inside the buffer and corridor- categorized respectively. To see what schools/daycare's may be inside the area we will download the data from FGDL.org, add to our map, and examine it. Finally to find the length of the transmission line we will use the polygon to line tool we will make the corridor a line feature, then use the polygon to centerline tool to create the route of the transmission line. Finally we use the measure feature tool to find the length of the transmission line

Final Map

The map layout (above) shows the study area- Manatee county in faded pink, and Sarasota county in faded purple on the bottom. The buffer zone can be seen in blue, the corridor is represented by the solid darker blue line, and the transmission line itself in that dark pink-purple color. The homes that will be impacted are yellow dots, and the conservation lands impacted are seen at the very bottom in bright green. Schools are on the map in red, pink, and green as dots, however you can also see they all fall outside the buffer

Questions Get Answers

  • Total impacted acreage from project: 10452.64 acres
  • Environmentally sensitive land impacted: 171.61/6566 acres inside the corridor (2.6%)
  • Wetlands: 137.98 acres (80.4%)
  • Uplands (dry): 33.36 acres (19.6%)
  • How many homes impacted? 114 total
  • 45 homes within the corridor
  • 72 homes within the buffer
  • How many schools impacted? 0
  • What is the length of the transmission line? 24.63 miles

Conclusion

In this analysis we looked at the study area of a transmission line between Sarasota and Manatee county. We learned that early 200 acres of conservation land will be impacted with 80% of that being wetlands, and 114 homes and businesses will be affected by the placement of the line. Luckily, we learned no schools will be impacted, and with the line cutting through nearly 25 miles of land, and impacting more than 6500 acres, this route may be our best option

The map (above) shows the impacted area in blue, the line itself in dark pink, the impacted homes as yellow dots, the roads in light pink, the schools and daycare's are the red, purple, and green dots, and finally the county parcels in faded pink and purple

The map layout (above) shows the study area- Manatee county in faded pink, and Sarasota county in faded purple on the bottom. The buffer zone can be seen in blue, the corridor is represented by the solid darker blue line, and the transmission line itself in that dark pink-purple color. The homes that will be impacted are yellow dots, and the conservation lands impacted are seen at the very bottom in bright green. Schools are on the map in red, pink, and green as dots, however you can also see they all fall outside the buffer