By Nicolas R. Malloy September 15, 2025

Introduction

In this lab, you will carry out a site-suitability analysis to identify viable locations for a music festival in Humboldt County. The workflow walks you through organizing a clean project workspace, preparing and standardizing datasets, and using ArcGIS Pro to apply a series of spatial criteria to narrow thousands of parcels down to a focused set of final candidates. You’ll finish by designing small, publication-ready maps that clearly communicate where those candidates are located.

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Estimated time to complete this tutorial: 4 hours

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Learning Outcomes

By the end of this lab, you will be able to:

• Import and organize source data in a project geodatabase; verify and, when necessary, reproject vector layers to a common coordinate system.
• Project raster data with appropriate resampling.
• Convert XY text data (WGS 1984) into a feature class with a defined output coordinate system.
• Use attribute queries to filter parcels by land-use category and zoning designation.
• Perform overlay and proximity operations, including Intersect, Select by Location, Buffer (variable-distance), Pairwise Clip, and Pairwise Erase.
• Calculate geometry to evaluate area thresholds and apply multi-criterion filtering to identify candidate parcels.
• Create 6×6-inch locator and site maps with essential map elements and export them at print resolution.

Setting Up Your Workspace

Before working with any data, establish an organized project structure on your computer. A well-structured workspace helps prevent confusion and makes it easier to manage your inputs, intermediate datasets, and outputs throughout the analysis.

Begin by creating a main project folder on your desktop. Name it Musical_Destination and avoid using spaces; use underscores instead. Inside this main folder, create three subfolders with the following roles:

• original – Use this folder to store unaltered source data, including anything you download for the project.
• working – Use this for temporary datasets or intermediate results you generate during the analysis process.
• final – Use this for polished outputs, such as exported tables, reports, and map layouts.

Figure 1: Establishing an organized workspace is the first step in any GIS project.