Lab 4 assignment - Cost surface

The Lab 4 exercise follows on the Week 9 in class exercise. The assignment is to perform an anisotropic cost-surface calculation and least cost paths calculation on your own research data. Choose one or two sites as the source areas, and then choose four destinations and generate polylines of equal travel time (isochrones). Then create Least cost paths between these areas.

Choose units that are appropriate to your study region. On a small area, create isochrones that are 10 min or 15 min apart. For bigger regions, consider using hours, or even days (8 hour days), for travel estimates.

You shouldn't need color to display these results because graphically it is pretty simple. Therfore, work with the greyscale color palette. Format the resulting map onto an 8.5 by 11 in greyscale on the laserprinter and hand in the print out before class next week. Alternately you may email the PDF.

If you do not have appropriate data, just invent some points by placing Points into a new Shapefile on features that you see in your GoogleEarth image.

If you have ASTER DEM data (30m) use that data. If not, use SRTM data. You must be in UTM (metric) space to perform these calculations. SRTM data is probably in decimal degrees (these are angular, not areal, units), so they must be transformed.

Lab 4 is due at the start of class next week.