Results

The above map was the first attempt to display the data given to me by Dr. Gillespie, but after much struggling, I realized it would be more beneficial to my learning experience ( and a bit easier) to explore the whole process of creating an NDVI from the acquired data and clipping it in order to fit the sites I specifically needed to study. The below map is the result of creating two shapefiles (one of the gangland area in Los Angeles, and one of the whole of Los Angeles City) overlaid on an NDVI of Los Angeles County (as seen Below. Now to compute the statistics of the whole image gave me far to many points that were irrelevant to the area I was studying.

In order to focus more specifically on the area of Los Angeles City (as highlighted in Yellow above) and the gangland of Los Angeles (as highlighted in Red above) multiple masks had to be created in order to find the statistical data of the specific region. This Data was then once again manipulated in ArcGIS (as Seen Below). 

The above image demonstrates specifically the Green Cover of the city of Los Angeles in Relation to the Green Cover. Through the Compute Statistics feature of ENVI I was able to determine that the average green cover present in all of Los Angeles was -0.104416 and the NDVI average value for Gangland was -0.21373.

To further explore the topic gangland area was studied in relation to parks (as shown Above).It was found that of the 302 parks that occur within the boundaries of the city of Los Angeles, 108 lie within gangland area specifically.   In other words, roughly 35% of Los Angeles’ public parks occur within gang areas. After computing the statistics for the parks that occur within all of Los Angeles (including gangland) the NDVI average value was found to be 0.109987. Parks within Gangland have an average NDVI value of .05277.

A final map was produced that displays “Los Angeles Average Income Versus Tree Cover." We can observe the spread of average income of the city of Los Angeles depicted in a Choropleth map format in terms of census blocks adjacent to a map of the green cover map of the city. The map of average income ranges from high depicted in green to low depicted in brown. A 10 value scale was used to give the map a more even flow between gradients. The map of tree cover uses the exact same color scheme to show the similarities between income and green cover. By visually analyzing these maps, we can conclude that those areas with the most wealth are also the most green. The maps are almost identical and this visually demonstrates that as wealth increases, so too does foliage for a specific region. In relation to gangland we see the areas outlined in red have much less green on average than areas not in gangland. From this we can visually conclude that gangland is much less green than area not in gangland.