Finding a New Landfill Site

FrancoisBekker — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 14:04:40 GMT

Good day

I'm new to GIS and I'm busy doing some work in ArcGIS Desktop but I've hit a wall. I have to find a new land fill site for the town that I live in. I have to select the landfill site according to specific criteria. The site must:

be within 10 km from the center of town.
be within 1 km from major roads.
not be within urban ares or permanently cultivated areas.
be at least 15 ha in size, but larger is better.
Not be within 500 m of a dam.
not be within conservation areas
not be near rivers especially on steep slopes (see table 1)

Table 1: Distance from rivers specifications

Slope	Min Distance (m) from Non Perennial Rivers	Min Distance (m) from perennial rivers
<=10	100	300
>10	200	600

These are the data sets that I have available.

File name	Description	Format
Landcover	Landcover	Shape
Landsat	Landsat image of study area	IMG
DEM	A DEM of the study area	GRID
Roads	All roads digitized form 1:50 000 topo map	Shape
Rivers	All rivers digitized form 1:50 000 topo map	Shape
Rivers_area	All rivers digitized form 1:50 000 topo map	Shape
Dams	All dams digitized form 1:50 000 topo map	Shape
Ca_loc	All local reserves areas digitized form 1:50 000 topo map	Shape
Ca_cnc	All nature reserves digitized form 1:50 000 topo map	Shape

So this is what I've done already:

I've given all the data sets the same projection;
I've buffered the 10 km
I've buffered the 1 km
I've selected all non - urban areas and non-permanent cultivated areas which are 15 ha or bigger from the land cover shape file.
I've exported that to a new output layer
I've buffered the 500 m around all dams
I've added the conservation area layers
I used the intersect tool to over lay the layers and now I can see the portions of land (from land cover shape) that have the following criteria:
1. are within 10 km of the town center
2. are within 1 km of major roads
3. are not in urban or permanent cultivated areas
4. are not within a distance of 500 m of a dam
5. are not within conservation areas

I'm not sure if I should have buffered the dams and of that was the best option.

But what I'm actually struggling with is step 7 of the first list. I'm not sure how to tackle this problem.

Could someone please help me? I would really appreciate any help.

Kind Regards

Francois Bekker

NB: if you need more info to help me feel free to contact me on gulu@sun.ac.za then we can perhaps arrange a Skype call.

Re: Finding a New Landfill Site

StevenGraf1 — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 14:53:46 GMT

You may be looking at a 3D buffer to find distances on a sloped surface. You can only do this if you have access to 3D analyst.

Also, for landfills, you may want to bring in a soils layer. You don't want all that garbage leaking into your ground water supply so a low permeable area may be necessary.

Steven

topic Re: Finding a New Landfill Site in Geoprocessing Questions

Finding a New Landfill Site

Re: Finding a New Landfill Site