Kevin ODonnell March 5, 2013 GIS Project Proposal Terrapin Road Kill Hotspots 1) Project Description.

Thousands of female Northern Diamondback Terrapins are killed by walking into traffic every year in their attempts to lay their eggs. This mortality rate is unsustainable for a population, yet we see no visible reduction in the population, so far. If current trends continue the result would eventually be the loss of local populations of terrapin. The significance of this project is that the results could be used to create some form of a protection plan for the turtles involving bulkheads, culverts, or other measures to keep then from wandering onto busy, high-speedlimit roads, as well as possibly keeping their surviving young from wandering into storm drains. The objective of this project is to create a hot spots map of road kill locations and preferred terrapin nesting habitat, and then perform an analysis on the two layers in order to find a trend that could be prevented. 2) Criteria. The criteria for the project include determining what a hotspot is, and the preferred nesting habitat of terrapins, their natural preferred habitat was dunes, but these have either been destroyed or blocked off by human activity. In order to determine the new preferred habitat I will look at land use, vegetation, and soil, amongst other attributes. The determination of a hotspot would be objective and depend on the density of the cluster of road kill points within a pre-determined area. 3) Data and Data Sources. Data needed for the project include the road kill location map, the different raster layers for land use, roads, an NDVI performed on a remotely sensed image, some sort of soil analysis, either through remote sensing or if such a data layer exists otherwise, and a bulkhead location layer. Most of the data should be obtainable through Tracy and Patrick Baker, with the rest coming from the NJDEP website as well as the ESRI website. The longest part of getting all the data needed would be waiting for Landsat images if not already processed, as well as performing the remote sensing on the Landsat images to generate a usable raster layer. 4) Methods. I plan on using the point density tool to determine hotspots in the road kill layer, the reclassify tool to give the different raster layers a given rank depending on whether they are a wanted nesting habitat attribute or not, and the raster calculator to combine those data into a finished map of where all the important, positive attributes come together. Then the hotspots will be overlaid onto the ranked image with a certain transparency, dependant on what makes both layers clearly visible, in order to compare density of kills to nesting habitat. Within those processes, I will

also have to do some remote sensing and possibly some georectification of Landsat images in order to get them into the proper coordinate system by marking points on a roads layer to points on the image itself. 5) Results. The expected results include a hotspots map of concentrated terrapin road kill locations, a raster layer of preferred habitat, and a combined map to see the correlation between the habitat and the abundance of road kill. As long as the results turn out as expected, we can see where some sort of diversion technique could be used to keep the turtles out of the road, via barriers, culverts, or other devices, not only in the sample area, but an estimate could be made of other places along the coast with similar attributes to those determined. 6) Time Line. The project should defiantly be able to be done before the end of the semester, especially if I can gather all of the data between now and the end of spring break so I can start working on it as soon as we get back. Then I could perform the needed analysis on the remotely sensed images, determine a proper buffer size for the given data in order to determine what I would consider to be a hotspot, and create ranked layers for the given attributes I want, and using raster calculator determine what is and is not primary nesting habitat for the turtles and compare it to the hotspots. I also want to give myself roughly a week in order to create the poster.