The 2008 Joint Meeting of the Society for Range Management and the America Forage and Grassland Council.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 - 3:20 PM

Ecological Site Mapping Arcobjects Solution and User Interface

Ahmad M. Salah1, Jeff Masters1, and Shane A. Green2. (1) Water Resources Engineer/GIS Specialist, Stanley Consultants, Inc, 5353 South 960 East, Suite 220, Salt Lake City, UT 84117, (2) Utah State Office, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, 125 South State Street, Salt Lake City, UT 84138

This paper summarizes an ArcObjects application developed by Stanley Consultants for the use of USDA/NRCS Utah offices. This application automates the mapping of ecological site extents for the State of Utah summarized by either the state boundary or the Major Land Resource Areas (MLRA). It was developed for the ArcGIS desktop 9.x (ArcView license). The process of using the USDA publicly-available soil survey geo-databases to generate a map for an ecological site is tedious and can take up to 30 minutes. The fact that this process needed to be re-iterated multiple times; i.e. around 500 times for approximately 500 ecological sites, adds some burden to the time/effort consumed. One of the ArcGIS ways of automating time-consuming efforts is tailoring a custom tool/application using ArcObjects. Using Visual Basic for Application (VBA), the application selects the files/geo-database(s) needed, adds the feature class(es) to a map document. Once the necessary files/geo-databases are referenced by the application, a sequential set of relationship classes is performed where the soil survey feature class is related to two tables residing in the soil survey geo-database, to obtain a list of ecological sites. The obtained ecological sites are used to populate a combo box for the users to select the desired site(s) from. The application, then, executes the selection based on the selected ecological site(s) and reports on the number of successfully selected polygon features. As a final step, a map is generated using the NRCS-specified template layout. In this map, the soil survey feature class is dimmed out and used as a background layer, whereas the selected ecological site polygons are highlighted in a newly generated layer. The map displays the selected ecological site ID and a description.


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