I am hoping someone can advise me on how to go about doing the following analysis or which tools to use. I have a 150km wide grid made up 30m pixel cells with values ranging from 0 to 11. I need to run an analysis to select a 100km wide corridor in the 150km corrdier for where thecells in the corridor add up to the maximum value. the 150km wide corridor is 1000km long
and you have ruled out reversing the costs associated with your classes? in that way, was a deterrent will now serve as an attractant
Thanks Dan Patterson I have set it up and inverted the numbers just incase. So do I just run a cost distance then? and I am unsure as to how to specify that the corridor created must be 100km wide though. Any ideas/ suggestions would be highly appreciated.
In cost analysis, you ascribe costs to landscape features, the lower the cost, the easier it is to traverse a piece of terrain (for example). By changing the order of the costs, things that were attractants now become deterrents...then do your regular procedure of doing the cost distance.
I should point out at this junction that you have used a linear scale meaning that there is little separation between the various classes. The path you will get differ drastically when you use non-linear scales since the ultimate goal is to minimize the traverse cost ... ultimately to a destination if you are extending this to an ultimate path.
For example in stead of
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
you used
1,2, 30, 40, 500, 6000, 7000, 8000,9000
I would venture that the likelihood of any segment of a path traversing the 4th or above classes would be minimal at best.
A cost, cost distance and ultimately a cost path analysis is purely subjective in the sense that I can generate any desired path from an origin to a destination simply by changing the order and/or cost values associated with landscape features.
should you wish finer, control, generate a slope map and aspect map, reclassify and add those to your cost surface generating a new cost surface...
So in summary....I can generate any minimal/maximal cost path desired simply by altering the factors to include in the 'cost' for a location, and the values I assign to the classes used in the cost.
so this becomes a "where do you want the path to go" style question
To create a corridor that is 100km wide is a little difficult when you use costs that are different than the value 1. You may want to look into the Corridor tool in Spatial Analyst: ArcGIS Help (10.2, 10.2.1, and 10.2.2)
To create a corridor with a with of 100 km you could use the Buffer tool (when you have you route converted to line) or the Euclidean Distance tool for raster input.