Weekly update 4

This week I have focused largely on Bungee GIS, which is the GIS tool I am making for TNC and for gas companies in the Marcellus shale play. The "Bungee" is an acronym for "Balancing Unconventional Natural Gas Extraction and the Environment." This week I added a couple of tools to Bungee, one of which does something kind of cool. It lets you create a raster that has bands of buffers out from features of interests. Within each band you can tell the tool to "exclude" infrastructure, have a constant impact value, or have an impact value that changes with distance from the feature. Here's an example

This has two sets of buffers away from streams. The first is an "exclusion zone" that is 100 m from streams (grey). The second is a "decreasing impact with distance" zone that goes from 100-300 m (red to yellow). Then outside of that there is no impact on the stream.

The idea is that people can use this tool to tell Bungee which areas are off-limits, which have some distance-based impact, and which have no impact. They might define such rasters for streams, wetlands, forests, schools, etc.