Instructions

Your Project Data and Analysis Plan consists of four parts:

  1. Introduction
  2. Table of Data Sources
  3. Outline of Methods
  4. Study Area Map

Check out each of these tabs for more info on each section:

Introduction

You will write a project introduction, structured like the introduction of an academic paper, in which you will briefly describe:

  • Background: The context for your project.
    • This section should provide the overall motivation for why your project is important.
    • This section should be 2 to 3 complete paragraphs.
  • Project Description: A broad overview of your project.
    • This section should make reference to the background paragraphs.
    • This section should be 2 to 3 complete paragraphs.
  • Statement of research questions, research goals, or other aims of your project.
    • This section should be 1 paragraph.
    • You may include a bullet-point list of your questions, goals, or aims.

You may optionally use sub-headings for each of these sub-sections.

Table of Data Sources

You must include a table of your proposed data sources.

  • Some of your data sources may be preliminary.

Your table must include the following columns:

  1. Name: A brief name of the dataset
  2. Data source: Where you got the data. This may be an agency (such as MassGIS or the US Census Bureau), a lab group, a person, a data repository, etc.
  3. Website URL: Include the website address from which you downloaded the data.
    • Note that this may not be available if your dataset is our own or was shared by a lab or individual. In that case you may enter NA for that row.
  4. Status: indicate whether you have already obtained the data.

You must include at least two data sources.

Methods Outline

In this section you’ll describe your plan for analyzing your data. It should be in the form of 2-4 paragraphs.

This section must address:

  • How you will use each of the data sources to address the aims listed in the introduction.
  • Which operations you will perform on each dataset.
  • Any statistics or calculation you plan to perform, if appropriate. If you don’t plan any calculations, you may enter NA.

Methods: Level of detail

In the methods section, you need to describe the general analytical approaches you will use. You may list the ArcMap tools you use, however you don’t need to describe sequences of menu clicks.

For example, you can describe your steps as:

To calculate the total area surrounding roads in Amherst, I created a 50 meter buffer around the roads in Amherst. I dissolved the resluting polygons to calculate the final area.

or

I calculated the Euclidean distance between Palmer and Shutesbury.

You should not say:

To create a 50 meter buffer, I clicked the Buffer tool in the Geoprocessing menu and selected Amherst Roads as the Input Feature. I selected meters as the distance unit and selected the All option from the Dissolve Type dropdown menu. Finally, I pressed the OK button and added the output as a layer to the Table of Contents.

Study Area Map

You must include a map that depicts the location and details of your study area (as appropriate).

If the extent of your project is very large, for example the entire US, you may include a single map.

If the extent of your project is very small, for example a census tract within New Your City, you need to include a map of your project area (the census tract) as well as a map of the lager area for context (for example a map of New Your city indicating the location of your focus census tract).