Final Project: Project Analysis and Presentation

 FPL's Proposed Transmission Line Corridor (arcgis.com) 

    For the final project, we were left to ourselves with the data given to help analyze a proposed corridor for an FPL project regarding a new transmission line across the Manatee-Sarasota County boundary. We had to see the impact this new line could have after it was introduced following much input from the community on homes, land, schools, and the environment. 

    To start the process, we had to decide on a basemap to create in order to perform the analysis on. I personally found using the county boundaries layer with roads for perspective the best to use for the basemap and inset map. Including the inset and study area box allowed for a clear view of what the general area was to be worked on.

    After we created a map for environmentally sensitive lands that would allow us to see what areas could be the most affected from this proposed line. We overlayed a national wetlands inventory (NWI) layer and conservation lands layer with the proposed corridor layer to see where the two intersected. After creating some general fields and selecting by attributes, we were able to select the intersection parts of the layers and create a new one. This new layer, now in the shape of the preferred corridor, displayed all the land beneath the new corridor and allowed us to perform a more in-depth analysis of the area.

    We then began the process of digitizing homes and finding which land parcels the corridor intersected for the next map. We again started with the basemap, added in the corridor layer and then added some aerial imagery for the homes. We created a point feature layer and set the transparency for the corridor layer to 35% in order to see the homes in the aerial imagery. Leaving dots on the homes and having two fields in the attribute table allowed us to differentiate homes in the corridor, or within the 400ft buffer we created surrounding the corridor. After that, we again created a common field in the parcel layer and intersected the areas with the pairwise intersect tool with the corridor to understand what parcels of land would be affected by the corridor. 

    The last map we created to analyze the corridor was the location of schools around the proposed corridor. We took previous data from the geocoding lab for the Manatee schools, created a new locator tool just like we did for that lab, and projected the points for the Sarasota schools. The resulting map, with aerial imagery, showed that no school came in or within the 400ft corridor. 

    Ultimately, after the analysis was completed, I found that this corridor would go over smoothly with the community. Even though some wetlands and some homes are affected, some sacrifices have to be made. I believe this proposed corridor allows for the least invasive addition of transmission lines.