This week we were tasked with working on our final projects, a continuation of our last 2 weeks. Using QGIS, Mapbox, Colorbrewer, and leaflet.I collected my data from fdgl.org. The only data that was required on my end was the census tracts data for the city or county of my choice. I chose Orange County or Orlando Florida. I downloaded a censustract file from the website and from there used QGIS to isolate Orange County and created a new shapefile with just that data. The grocery store data that I used for Orange County came directly from google earth. I used google earth to search for grocery stores within Orange County and from there I sorted through the results. I threw away anything that appeared to be a gas station or convenience store and only used grocery stores. I saved them to my temporary places and created a kml file which I was able to open and convert to a shapefile with QGIS. The near data was collected using arcmap using the near tool. I took the grocery stores and centroid data and ran it through the near analysis with a 1 mile distance. This returned data on the attribute table. I then saved this data. When this data saved a .dbf file was created. This file can be opened in excel. From here i saved it as a .csv file. I joined that .csv file with the census tracts to create a new set of data for food deserts and oasis. I think there is validity behind my results there are a few areas that appear to be off, simply due to the size of the census tract. An entire area is deemed a food oasis just because it’s in the same tract as a grocery store. Yet there can be a tract closer and it does not register, due to the 1 mile buffer. There is a fault in that design.
There are trends that you can see in the data that is represented. You can see that there are what appear to be rural areas on the outskirts of town that are simply lacking access to grocery stores. There could be grocery stores in the neighboring counties, just not Orange County. When you see these results displayed the questions arise of what the socioeconomics of an area have to do with food deserts. There are many areas around the main part of the city that appear to not have a problem with access to food. This does not surprise me, this is a normal occurrence in most places. The further you move from the central part of town, the less likely you will find businesses, in our case, a grocery store.
No comments:
Post a Comment