It is the end of a fun semester and a great year that has been full of GIS work. In this particular semester, I took an Urban Planning class where the final project was a group research paper on a trade area analysis of the city of North Port St. Joe, FL. You may be wondering what a trade area analysis is and that is the studying and understanding trade activity within a given geographical area. My part of the project was to make my favorite thing...MAPS! I was assigned to use GIS to conduct a radius analysis of downtown Port St. Joe, identify equal competition areas, and visualize the median income of Port St. Joe citizens. For the first map, the radius analysis was created to visualize the distance people in Port St. Joe and other surrounding areas will need to drive to reach the downtown area of Port St. Joe, FL, Reid Ave.
The next map I made for this project was the Equal Competition map, where I identified other downtown competition areas in surrounding cities that people could drive to instead of Port St. Joe. Those cities were Panama City, Mexico Beach, Wewahitchka, and Apalachicola.
The third and final map I made for my portion of the project was a median income map. The data for the map was collected from city data which determined the median income of each section from U.S. census blocks. This data was visualized by clipping the census blocks to the Port St. Joe city layer and using the median income data from city data to visualize the map below.
I have done a lot of work for the people of North Port St. Joe over the last year and a half and with this being the last project I have done for them it was the most enjoyable for sure. I hope the work that I have done will surely benefit the community and make it better for the people who live in the city.
