a "Fuzzy Distance" based on data

Imagine that we have a rare snail and we want to protect it. We can set aside land, but the more land we set aside the more money we spend and more political enemies we make, etc, etc.

Copy the folder Q:\courses\geolgis\sharedwork\Demo\Fuzzy to your Q: drive and open the .mxd file therein.

So where do these critters like to live?

see the Excel file tab_area_output.xls in the Fuzzy foder. Where would you put the buffer?

How do you make a probability buffer (a data-driven fuzzy boundary) where the buffer size represents the probability that you'd include the snails?
Open the dist_v_prob.xls file, which "looks up" the snail distance-versus-probability for each the distance value. If we export this into ArcMap, we can plot probability of finding a snail instead of distance away from a stream.

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author: harbord@wlu.edu