GPS: Grocery Store Access

Into:
This exercise's purpose was to teach me how to take gather data on a GPS handheld receiver and drop it into ArcGIS to create a map out of it.

Methods:
We had freedom with this exercise to choose what we wanted to map, and I was curious as to most peoples' everday access to food in the city of Eau Claire.  So I decided to do some research as to where the major supermarkets in Eau Claire are and drove around marking waypoints in my GPS as I got to each one.  I only used major supermarkets with an inventory of a wide variety of items, which in Eau Claire include:  Gordy's County Market, Target, ALDI, Walmart, Festival Foods, and MEGA.  I did not include small specialty markets, serving a special clientele, such as Just Local Foods.  I then took the census tracts from the ESRI database that the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire provides students and put them on the map as well to help me show population levels.

Results:
As can be seen by the map, most of the major supermarkets lie in the outskirts of the city.  This leads to a mini food desert being created in the central area of the city.  I'd like to explore more into this issue and see what's being done about this potential food desert in Eau Claire.