Proposed Road Closures to Accommodate the Black Hill Snail Mating Season in Western South Dakota

From June to August in western South Dakota the snail population of the Black Hills & Badlands experience their prime mating season, allowing population to grow for the next year. Although this is the prime time for population growth in the area, the snails often run into a problem that ends up interfering with their schedule, the roads in the surrounding area.

In my first class for GIS, one dataset we used for multiple labs was the mating patterns for Black Hill Snails in South Dakota. The entire semester culminated in researching how the surrounding roads affected mating season and which roads should be thinned to better benefit the population. As shown in figure 1 below, it is possible to trim the size of the roads around the national park to better accommodate the snail mating season while also keeping most of the

roads open. This lab allowed me to sharpen my skills by utilizing the buffer, intersect, clip, and dissolve tools while also gather information and shapefiles from the United States Census Bureau website, all useful spatial analysis skills to hopefully use one day in my career.