A prospectus is a proposal to undertake a research project. A prospectus is a statement that briefly describes the questions, materials, and methods a researcher will use in his or her research. Your draft prospectus is 15/150 points and your final prospectus (after incorporating comments and suggestions) is worth another 15 points. The draft is due Oct 16 and the final will be due later, to be announced.
Here is an example:
The question that is of interest to me is how much potential for conflict there is in Wyoming concerning wind farms development and wildlife management. Southeastern Wyoming has some of the highest potential for wind development in the US, and there have been 7 new wind projects in this area in the past 2 years. I searched for recent newspaper articles on wind projects and wildlife and discovered that one project was halted because of concerns with it being in sage grouse "core area".
My plan is to combine wind potential data for Wyoming with data on sage grouse core areas, big game crucial habitat and migration routes, and other wildlife data to determine the amount of overlap and identify other potential conflict areas. I plan to use GIS to summarize the amount of potential conflict in terms of area of overlap in both map form and table form.
Please submit the assignment to the eCompanion dropbox (less chance of me inadvertantly missing or deleting your assignments in my email).
Questions a GIS can answer:
•Condition: where do these conditions exist?
•Trends: what has changed here since... ?
•Patterns: what spatial patterns exist?
•Modeling: what if... ?
•Proximity: what are the characteristics of the area around existing features?
•Boundary Operations: what exists within a specific region, and how much?
•Linear Operations: what is the best route to a location?
