Loch Lomond and The Trossachs were established as a national park in 2001. Loch Lomond, UK’s second largest lake, is situated within 50 km of Glasgow (a major UK city) and has long been an important recreational centre for water sports, hill and forest walking, mountain biking, etc. A long distance path crosses the area (The West Highland Way), taking walkers, in five days, from Glasgow to Glen Nevis (the location of the UK’s highest mountain). The lake’s cultural and ecological significance has long been recognized. As one of Europe’s deepest lakes [Hydromod, 2003; www.hydromod.de/Eurolakes/] it is an important natural freshwater habitat; our university also has an internationally recognized field study centre on the lake’s shores [SCENE, 2009; http://www.gla.ac.uk/scene/].

	Our university offers four one-year Geomatics MSc programmes which attract UK and international students. Coursework, September to April, precedes the students’ six-month research project. As part of their coursework, those students with little background in GIS must find a suitable location for a “Family Activity Centre” on the lake, using GIS. Students must submit an individual report on their methods used. Many illustrate their report with their own photos - so the task reviews and explores GIS skills, and encourages visits to an important location near our city

Drummond, J.

Gaur, M.K.

English

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       Gaur, M.K., and Drummond, J. (2010) Locating a New Family Activity Centre: A Recreational Development Application of GIS. In: Geography Aboard!, University of Perm, Russia, 20 - 24 Jul 2010,   Copyright © 2010 The Authors.  A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge   The content must not be changed in any way or reproduced in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder(s)   When referring to this work, full bibliographic details must be given    http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/46101/      Deposited on:  24  March 2015          Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk  1 “Locating a new Family Activity Centre – a Recreational Development application of GIS” Manoj Kumar Gaur BSc (Dungar College, India) MSc (Univ. of Glasgow, UK) Jane Drummond MEng  (Univ. of New Brunswick, Canada) PhD (Univ. of Newcastle, UK) Geomatics Group, Dept. Geographic & Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK  1. Background  Loch Lomond and The Trossachs were established as a national park in 2001. Loch Lomond, UK’s second largest lake, is situated within 50 km of Glasgow (a major UK city) and has long been an important recreational centre for water sports, hill and forest walking, mountain biking, etc. A long distance path crosses the area (The West Highland Way), taking walkers, in five days, from Glasgow to Glen Nevis (the location of the UK’s highest mountain). The lake’s cultural and ecological significance has long been recognized. As one of Europe’s deepest lakes [Hydromod, 2003; www.hydromod.de/Eurolakes/] it is an important natural freshwater habitat; our university also has an internationally recognized field study centre on the lake’s shores [SCENE, 2009; http://www.gla.ac.uk/scene/].  Our university offers four one-year Geomatics MSc programmes which attract UK and international students. Coursework, September to April, precedes the students’ six-month research project. As part of their coursework, those students with little background in GIS must find a suitable location for a “Family Activity Centre” on the lake, using GIS. Students must submit an individual report on their methods used. Many illustrate their report with their own photos - so the task reviews and explores GIS skills, and encourages visits to an important location near our city!  2. Requirements  The new “Family Activity Centre” must provide: instruction in diving where the water is not too deep and the lake bed is silt free; instruction in sailing and canoeing in water not too crowded by motorised boats; and, footpath access. Accommodation is not provided but families can stay in nearby hotels or campsites; daytime meals will be at nearby picnic sites or restaurants.   2 3. Sources  Students are provided with data sets (see TABLE I) which can be imported into ArcGIS, but must find more (eg hotels, diving tuition regulations). They can also access digital topographic data sets from the national mapping organization’s geospatial database through the Digimap service [edina.ac.uk/digimap] and satellite images through the Landmap service [www.landmap.ac.uk]. A converter for postcode to map coordinates was available [www.nearby.org.uk] for hotels and restaurants. With the data set ‘LOMBOATS’ (see TABLE II for a fragment of this data set), some students calculated the number of motorboats (eg ‘totmot’) in a lake area and then motorboat density (eg ‘motdens’).               Every student finds his or her own solution, but a typical flow-line is provided in Table III. Variations arise as students discover different rules regarding optimum depths for diving tuition (2-20m is typical), the danger of silt (very small substrate particle size is hazardous) on the lake bed, etc.  Several  GIS  analytical  procedures  are  used, as shown in TABLE III. Essentially an overlay is carried out of a) the interpolated data sets (eg Fig. 1a) reclassified (eg Fig 1b,c) according to appropriate rules (eg i. sediment size less than 0.05mm or ii. depth between 2 - 20m is suitable for learning to dive) as suitable for a recreational activity, and b) the Distance Maps (eg TABLE I  Data sets provided for the exercise  1. Water depths as X,Y,Depth at sample locations (depths.txt; ASCII) 2. Substrate as X,Y,Sediment Grain Size at sample locations (substrate.txt; ASCII) 3. Terrain model as X,Y and elevation at sample locations (dtm.txt; ASCII) 4. Loch Lomond shoreline and islands feature class (Lomcoast; polygon shapefile) 5. Recreational Boat-use feature class (Lomboats; polygon shapefile) 6. Visitor Centres feature class (Viscents; point shapefile) 7. Car Parks feature class (Carparks; point shapefile) 8. West Highland Way feature class (Lomwhwy; polyline shapefile) 9. Scannings of the four 1:50000 scale topographic maps covering Loch Lomond from for ‘on-screen’ digitizing roads, footpaths, etc. (TIF files with the accompanying world or .TFW files), provided by the national mapping organistion.    3 Fig. 2c) of feature datasets (footpaths, hotels, picnic sites, etc.) reclassified as suitable or unsuitable (eg Fig. 2d showing a 0.5km buffer) for the Family Activity Centre location.   4. Outcome  The outcome in terms of the most suitable location for the proposed Family Activity Centre is shown in FIGURE 3. The approach presented in this paper is Figure 3a. An alternative approach (Figure 3b) developed by many students is to maintain the feature classes in vector form, to produce vector buffers around important features such as car parks, hotels, footpaths, etc., and then search interactively for suitable sites This represents a faster but riskier solution!  TABLE II. LOMBOATS attribute table (part), average Saturday summer boat usage.        a b c d LEGEND  Unsuitable Suitable FIGURE 1 a) gridded substrate: brown finer to blue coarser grains; b) good substrate (grains > 0.5mm); c) good depths (2-20m); d) good diving (overlay of good substrate & good depths). This figure only shows the southern part of the lake.   4  FIGURE 2 a) Motorised boats/km2 ; b) Fig 2a rasterised and re-classified to give good locations for sailing tuition (<30 motorised boats/km2) or ‘goodsailing’; c) Distance Map of picnic sites; d) Fig 2c re-classified to give ‘goodpicnics’ – that is areas (green) within 500m of a designated picnic/barbecue site, showing southern part of the lake only.                   3a  a     b Unsuitable Suitable c d a b FIGURE 3. a) identification of a suitable (red) location for a Family Activity Centre using raster overlay of 9 datasets, as detailed in TABLE III; b) alternative identification of a suitable location (blue circle) for a Family Activity Centre using vector buffering. The same location is identified in each approach!  5 5. Conclusions It happens that the site identified is indeed popular with learner boatsmen and divers – thus confirming the processing model. For the students, much experience is acquired of GIS processing; also students are learning more about the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park!  TABLE III GIS Data Processing to determine locations for a Family Activity Centre                       create field motdens( motor boats/sq km) overlay all ‘good’ data sets Newly digitized classes: hotels;camps; restaurants substrate.txt; depths.txt lomboats viscents (not used); picnics; carparks lomhywy  interpolate  .txt files to  grids mask  using lomcoast classify giving goodsubstrate gooddepths gooddiving  location  Rasterise on basis of  motdens classify giving goodsailing   goodsailing location overlay: goodsubstrate gooddepths  create 2 Distance Maps classify giving goodpicnics goodcarparks overlay: goodpicnics goodcarparks good- infrastructur1 location edit in  extra  footpaths create 1 Distance Map classify  giving goodwalks   goodwalks location create 3 Distance Maps classify giving goodhotels goodcamps..  overlay: goodhotels goodcamps..  good- infrastructur2 location Suitable locations: FAMILY ACTIVITY CENTRE Legend  Data set   Process 1 2 

Locating a New Family Activity Centre: A Recreational Development Application of GIS

Enlighten: Publications

  
 
 
 
 
 
Gaur, M.K., and Drummond, J. (2010) Locating a New Family Activity 
Centre: A Recreational Development Application of GIS. In: Geography 
Aboard!, University of Perm, Russia, 20 - 24 Jul 2010,  
 
Copyright © 2010 The Authors. 
 
A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or 
study, without prior permission or charge  
 
The content must not be changed in any way or reproduced in any format 
or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder(s)  
 
When referring to this work, full bibliographic details must be given 
 
 
 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/46101/ 
 
 
 
 
 
Deposited on:  24  March 2015 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 
 1 
“Locating a new Family Activity Centre – a Recreational Development application of GIS” 
Manoj Kumar Gaur BSc (Dungar College, India) MSc (Univ. of Glasgow, UK) 
Jane Drummond MEng  (Univ. of New Brunswick, Canada) PhD (Univ. of Newcastle, UK) 
Geomatics Group, Dept. Geographic & Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK 
 
1. Background 
 Loch Lomond and The Trossachs were established as a national park in 2001. Loch 
Lomond, UK’s second largest lake, is situated within 50 km of Glasgow (a major UK city) and has 
long been an important recreational centre for water sports, hill and forest walking, mountain 
biking, etc. A long distance path crosses the area (The West Highland Way), taking walkers, in 
five days, from Glasgow to Glen Nevis (the location of the UK’s highest mountain). The lake’s 
cultural and ecological significance has long been recognized. As one of Europe’s deepest lakes 
[Hydromod, 2003; www.hydromod.de/Eurolakes/] it is an important natural freshwater habitat; 
our university also has an internationally recognized field study centre on the lake’s shores 
[SCENE, 2009; http://www.gla.ac.uk/scene/]. 
 Our university offers four one-year Geomatics MSc programmes which attract UK and 
international students. Coursework, September to April, precedes the students’ six-month research 
project. As part of their coursework, those students with little background in GIS must find a 
suitable location for a “Family Activity Centre” on the lake, using GIS. Students must submit an 
individual report on their methods used. Many illustrate their report with their own photos - so the 
task reviews and explores GIS skills, and encourages visits to an important location near our city! 
 
2. Requirements 
 The new “Family Activity Centre” must provide: instruction in diving where the water is 
not too deep and the lake bed is silt free; instruction in sailing and canoeing in water not too 
crowded by motorised boats; and, footpath access. Accommodation is not provided but families 
can stay in nearby hotels or campsites; daytime meals will be at nearby picnic sites or restaurants. 
 
 2 
3. Sources 
 Students are provided with data sets (see TABLE I) which can be imported into ArcGIS, but 
must find more (eg hotels, diving tuition regulations). They can also access digital topographic 
data sets from the national mapping organization’s geospatial database through the Digimap 
service [edina.ac.uk/digimap] and satellite images through the Landmap service 
[www.landmap.ac.uk]. A converter for postcode to map coordinates was available 
[www.nearby.org.uk] for hotels and restaurants. With the data set ‘LOMBOATS’ (see TABLE II 
for a fragment of this data set), some students calculated the number of motorboats (eg ‘totmot’) in 
a lake area and then motorboat density (eg ‘motdens’).  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
  Every student finds his or her own solution, but a typical flow-line is provided in 
Table III. Variations arise as students discover different rules regarding optimum depths for diving 
tuition (2-20m is typical), the danger of silt (very small substrate particle size is hazardous) on the 
lake bed, etc.  Several  GIS  analytical  procedures  are  used, as shown in TABLE III. Essentially 
an overlay is carried out of a) the interpolated data sets (eg Fig. 1a) reclassified (eg Fig 1b,c) 
according to appropriate rules (eg i. sediment size less than 0.05mm or ii. depth between 2 - 20m 
is suitable for learning to dive) as suitable for a recreational activity, and b) the Distance Maps (eg 
TABLE I  Data sets provided for the exercise 
 
1. Water depths as X,Y,Depth at sample locations (depths.txt; ASCII) 
2. Substrate as X,Y,Sediment Grain Size at sample locations (substrate.txt; ASCII) 
3. Terrain model as X,Y and elevation at sample locations (dtm.txt; ASCII) 
4. Loch Lomond shoreline and islands feature class (Lomcoast; polygon shapefile) 
5. Recreational Boat-use feature class (Lomboats; polygon shapefile) 
6. Visitor Centres feature class (Viscents; point shapefile) 
7. Car Parks feature class (Carparks; point shapefile) 
8. West Highland Way feature class (Lomwhwy; polyline shapefile) 
9. Scannings of the four 1:50000 scale topographic maps covering Loch Lomond 
from for ‘on-screen’ digitizing roads, footpaths, etc. (TIF files with the 
accompanying world or .TFW files), provided by the national mapping organistion. 
 
 
 3 
Fig. 2c) of feature datasets (footpaths, hotels, picnic sites, etc.) reclassified as suitable or 
unsuitable (eg Fig. 2d showing a 0.5km buffer) for the Family Activity Centre location.  
 
4. Outcome 
 The outcome in terms of the most suitable location for the proposed Family Activity Centre 
is shown in FIGURE 3. The approach presented in this paper is Figure 3a. An alternative approach 
(Figure 3b) developed by many students is to maintain the feature classes in vector form, to 
produce vector buffers around important features such as car parks, hotels, footpaths, etc., and then 
search interactively for suitable sites This represents a faster but riskier solution! 
 
TABLE II. LOMBOATS attribute table (part), average Saturday summer boat usage.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
a b c d 
LEGEND 
 
Unsuitable 
Suitable 
FIGURE 1 a) gridded substrate: brown finer to blue coarser grains; b) good 
substrate (grains > 0.5mm); c) good depths (2-20m); d) good diving (overlay of good 
substrate & good depths). This figure only shows the southern part of the lake. 
 
 4 
 
FIGURE 2 a) Motorised boats/km2 ; b) Fig 2a rasterised and re-classified to give good 
locations for sailing tuition (<30 motorised boats/km2) or ‘goodsailing’; c) Distance Map of 
picnic sites; d) Fig 2c re-classified to give ‘goodpicnics’ – that is areas (green) within 
500m of a designated picnic/barbecue site, showing southern part of the lake only. 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
3a 
 
a 
 
 
 
 
b 
Unsuitable 
Suitable 
c d 
a b 
FIGURE 3. a) identification of a suitable (red) location for a Family 
Activity Centre using raster overlay of 9 datasets, as detailed in 
TABLE III; b) alternative identification of a suitable location (blue 
circle) for a Family Activity Centre using vector buffering. The 
same location is identified in each approach! 
 5 
5. Conclusions 
It happens that the site identified is indeed popular with learner boatsmen and divers – thus 
confirming the processing model. For the students, much experience is acquired of GIS 
processing; also students are learning more about the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park! 
 
TABLE III GIS Data Processing to determine locations for a Family Activity Centre 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
create field 
motdens( motor 
boats/sq km) 
overlay all 
‘good’ data 
sets 
Newly digitized 
classes: 
hotels;camps; 
restaurants 
substrate.txt; 
depths.txt 
lomboats viscents (not 
used); 
picnics; 
carparks 
lomhywy 
 interpolate  
.txt files to  
grids 
mask  
using 
lomcoast 
classify giving 
goodsubstrate 
gooddepths 
gooddiving  
location  
Rasterise on 
basis of  
motdens 
classify 
giving 
goodsailing 
 
 
goodsailing 
location 
overlay: 
goodsubstrate 
gooddepths  
create 2 
Distance 
Maps 
classify giving 
goodpicnics 
goodcarparks 
overlay: 
goodpicnics 
goodcarparks 
good- 
infrastructur1 
location 
edit in  
extra  
footpaths 
create 1 
Distance 
Map 
classify  
giving 
goodwalks 
 
 
goodwalks 
location 
create 3 
Distance 
Maps 
classify giving 
goodhotels 
goodcamps.. 
 
overlay: 
goodhotels 
goodcamps.. 
 
good- 
infrastructur2 
location 
Suitable locations: 
FAMILY ACTIVITY CENTRE 
Legend 
 
Data set 
 
 
Process 
1 
2 


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Locating a New Family Activity Centre: A Recreational Development Application of GIS

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