Geographic Information Systems: GIS II Lab 3: Geodatabase development

Goals
The goal of this lab exercise is to create documentation of the organization and planning for a personal project geodatabase schema. The components and behavior of the geodatabase will also be developed and outlined in this lab.

Methods
Part 1: Developing the geodatabase schema
To develop a geodatabase schema, these questions must be considered:
What is the vision and purpose? The purpose of the project is to identify areas suggested for protecting the sensitive species, Oregon Spotted Frog in Northern California. The geodatabase will provide a place to store all of the necessary shapefiles and models to be worked with.
Who may use it and why? I will be the only one to use it since it is a personal course project, however my professor may have access to it.
Which type did you choose? I chose the File Geodatabase because a Personal Geodatabase only allows 2GB of storage, and I may need more than that. If this were a project being done for the government, I would use an Enterprise Geodatabase so that multiple people could work with the data and edit simultaneously.
What are the geographic characteristics? (area extent, map scale, projection) The map projection will be NAD 1983. All layers that were not previously in NAD 1983 will be reprojected. The map scale will be 1:100,000 to show the area of Northern California where the frog is typically found. The area extent will be from the west coast of California to the eastern border, and from the northern border down to San Francisco.
Did you incorporate topology? How about annotations? Why or why not? Topology and annotations will not be necessary. Topology would be used in the future for actually delineating an area for protection, but this project is just to provides suggestions. Annotations will not be used as there should not be any need for them. Simple labels can be used if necessary.
Do you have a plan for metadata? If so, what is it? If not, why not? Much of the original metadata has been provided with the datasets downloaded from Esri Online and the CWHR, and additional processing changes performed by me will be added.

To create a geodatabase, open ArcCatalog and go to the desired folder in which you'd like to store the geodatabase. Right-click on it and select New > File Geodatabase from the drop down menu. You may then create new feature datasets, feature classes, etc or import feature classes and datasets from other geodatabases.

Part 2: Describing the components and their behavior
Once the schema has been developed, the next step is to define the components and behavior of the geodatabase. This means to describe which datasets are included and why, and then to describe the attribute fields and their content.

A polygon feature class showing the range of the Oregon Spotted Frog in California will be used to identify the areas which need to be protected. This layer contains the attributes Sname (Species Name), CName (the common name).
A raster file will be converted to polygons using the WHRNAME field which represents the type of habitat, and used to examine the types of habitat within the species range. It will also be used to create a polygon layer with a habitat suitability ranking. A habitat suitability rank of Low, Medium, and High based on expert opinion suitability value us used to identify the best habitats for the species and therefore the most important to be protected.
The counties feature class from the mgisdata folder provided by UWEC will be used to create a study area polygon shapefile by clipping the feature class to the four adjacent counties in which the Oregon Spotted Frog is found. The only important attribute field is the county names, used to make a selection for clipping.
Infrastructure layers from ArcGIS online will be reprojected and used to identify the places it may be most difficult to ban construction to protect the species.

To outline the behavior settings of the feature classes, include subtypes, coded and/range domains, split and merge policies, and default values that will be utilized. This can be organized into a table like so: