The locations of the pools had been gathered with GPS units by a Vermont organization prior to the commencement of our project and we had been provided with this data, along with a digital photograph from each pool location. We also had access to a wealth of digital data from the Windham county and Vermont areas, among them soils data, school district boundaries, bear habitat, roads, and many others. The first step in making our map was exploring the data and learning what each of the coverages meant. We did this, as all our mapping, using the mapping software ArcView on the PCs in the Mount Holyoke College Geoprossesing Laboratory. We placed major cities on the map to aid viewers in orienting themselves to the map.
Windham county is highlighted in yellow.
Our first idea was to map the locations of the vernal pools that we knew about and then use the characteristics of their locations to predict where vernal pools might arise in the rest of Vermont. In order to do this, we decided to examine soil data for all of Vermont. We had very specific data for Windham county, with a more generalized coverage for the entire state. We used the Windham County Soil Survey book to examine our soil types. By using queries, we thought we would be able to locate specific soil characteristics that would locate probable positions of vernal pools.