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| GRAB BAG |
The County of Hunterdon 1714 – Present
Patricia Leidner, Hunterdon County Division of GIS; Russell Norkevich, Hunterdon County Engineering Department; Stephanie B. Stevens, Hunterdon County Cultural & Heritage Commission
This poster displays the municipal boundaries of The County of Hunterdon, New Jersey, at certain points in time, since it was formed in 1714. Information regarding the changes to the municipal boundaries was taken from "The Story of New Jersey's Civil Boundaries 1606-1968" by John P. Snyder and the NJ Geological Survey; Bulletin 67, 1988 supplement
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Spatial Analysis of Office Sustainability Performance
John Pearson (CDM), Charlie Mielcarek (CDM), Eric Pescatore (CDM), Tom Pedersen (CDM)
Large organizations often have many offices in diverse locations with greatly varying local incentives and resources available for recycling. Camp, Dresser and McKee (CDM) facilities conducted a nationwide sustainability survey of office recycling status in order to help quantify and assess the internal sustainability of CDM. Survey results were imported into a geodatabase of US office locations in order to display and analyze spatial variations in paper, plastic and aluminum recycling status. Data showed geographic trends across the nation, with the west leading all other regions (88% of surveyed programs in place), with mixed results elsewhere. State-level status also varied, indicating a lack of developed state incentives and programs for recycling. Washington led all states (100% of surveyed programs in place), while Texas (54% of surveyed programs in place) and Florida (48% of programs in place) lagged behind others. However, state trends did not necessarily dictate individual office performance. The resulting maps and data informed upper-level decision making regarding resource priorities for recycling programs at CDM. The results show that GIS provides a novel analysis technique to help understand regional variation in sustainable office management practices as well as possible future applications for environmental, social and economic indicators. |
| GREEN ENERGY SITING & CLIMATE |
The Green Dream
Alena Pearce, Chris St. Andre, Jason Tauktu, Bridgewater State College
The United States is currently in a burgeoning energy crisis and alternative sources must be explored. In Massachusetts there are several viable candidates for alternative energy sources with wind energy, biomass energy, and landfill gas energy being the most promising. Although these energy sources are currently being used in the state, they are limited in extent and therefore benefits may not be fully realized. This project investigates renewable energy potential in Massachusetts and whether the impact of using alternative methods could satisfy the state's energy demands. By examining possible sites for wind turbines, biomass crops, and landfill gas collection systems, areas for implementing these energy forms will be mapped and predictions for the maximum potential energy derived from each renewable source will be compared with the state's current energy consumption. |
Green Energy: Using Methane Gas to Power the University of New Hampshire
Sam Lingeman, Tim Sullivan, UNH Energy and Campus Development
In August 2007 the University of New Hampshire (UNH), in cooperation with Waste Management, Inc., began construction on a landfill gas project that will pipe enriched and purified gas underground from Waste Management's Rochester, NH landfill 12.7 miles to the UNH Durham campus. This project, known as the ECOLine™, will make UNH the first university in the U.S. to use landfill gas as its primary energy source accounting for 80-85% of its total energy consumption. In addition, the ECOLine™ will stabilize fluctuating energy costs which have grown at an annual rate of 18.9% and reduce UNH's greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 67% below 2005 levels. As part of this project UNH's Energy and Campus Development GIS Group (ECD GIS) was tasked with the challenge of mapping the 12.7 mile pipe in order to comply with Public Utility Commission (PUC) requirements and to complement existing campus data holdings. Using tools such as a Trimble RTK GPS unit, traditional Survey equipment and methods, and radio detection equipment ECD GIS was able to map the location, both horizontally and vertically, of the ECOLine™. Once all mapping was completed the data was imported into ArcGIS and incorporated into the existing campus wide GIS. |
| HEALTH |
Developing GIS tools for public access to environmental health information
Kathleen Attfield, Silent Spring Institute, Sarah Dunagan, Silent Spring Institute, Ruthann Rudel, Silent Spring Institute
Maps are a powerful tool to identify spatial disparities in health and grasp relationships between disease and environmental characteristics. Often, community environmental health concerns are first expressed in maps. Silent Spring Institute has developed a web-based, interactive mapping tool, the Massachusetts Health and Environmental Information System (MassHEIS), that serves the dual goals of community access to health and environmental information and researcher access to underlying datasets developed in the Institute's Cape Cod Breast Cancer and Environment Study and by state, federal, and other nonprofit sources. Users can: (1) view pre-assembled maps for their area; (2) independently explore relationships among the factors; and (3) explore FAQs and links to outside contextual information for interpreting the maps. For example, a pre-assembled asthma map displays the geographic distributions of asthma hospitalizations, transportation corridors, and air quality measures and provides links to asthma studies from PubMed, ATSDR information on environmental triggers, and the Environmental Defense Scorecard ranking of the community's pollution levels. Technical users may download or interactively access the GIS data and metadata via ArcIMS web services. We will discuss the factors involved in developing a presentation format suitable for communicating complex data to many levels of user, providing appropriate context for interpretation of the data, protecting privacy, and incorporating the input of potential users in the development and assessment of the tool. MassHEIS complements state and national health tracking efforts and public health GIS research. |
| INTERNET, MOBILE AND SERVER TECHNOLOGIES |
Free GIS Software Tools
Michael Smith, Maine Office of GIS
Software licensing issues and software costs increasingly become a struggle for GIS organizations trying to provide the greatest amount of service for the lowest cost. The open source software movement has created a wealth of software that is free of licensing restrictions, and free to acquire. This workshop will review a wide range of open source GIS tools, discussing their strengths and weaknesses and showing examples. MapServer is a widely-used open source web mapping platform, with many offshoots which allow you to easily set up inexpensive web mapping. PostgreSQL and PostGIS are components of a completely open-source spatial database. We will also look at desktop tools including Quantum GIS and gvSIG. Live demos will be shown, with plenty of time for questions/answers and audience participation. |
Using Web-based networking tools in the workplace - How never to leave your cube
Eric Pescatore (CDM), John Pearson (CDM)
Preservation of institutional knowledge reduces duplicity in environments where many users and functions rely on a limited pool of data and individual trial and error. Archived data represents a similar set of predicaments, with the location and the ability to accurately query older data sets essential to reducing unnecessary workloads and repetition. The ability to share data can also save time while at the same time open up new avenues of work. This poster presents and highlights the importance of data management, collection and distribution of GIS concepts and data, and communication within a large and dispersed organization. CDM successfully experimented with a web log (blog) and wiki in order to share user experiences, update progress and alert others to software problems. On large projects with complicated workflows we used and developed various web-based and internal program, which has permitted employees who work in other offices to communicate updates to datasets and revisions to documentation. This has made our workflow more efficient and made managing GIS data easier for many levels of users. Using an open portal for communication to foster new ideas, concepts and updated information is an excellent solution to dealing with complicated projects and data. |
| NATURAL RESOURCES |
Air Force Groundwater Cleanup Progress on the Massachusetts Military Reservation
Maire Cotter Brown, Scott DeHainaut, CH2M Hill; Rose Forbes, Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment
The Massachusetts Military Reservation (MMR) is located immediately south of the Cape Cod Canal in the Upper Cape region of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Past practices on the MMR have resulted in numerous plumes of groundwater contamination which threaten the underlying sole source aquifer. The Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment (AFCEE) groundwater remediation program at the MMR is leading a massive effort to clean up these plumes. It is the largest and most complex remediation project of its kind in the Department of Defense; the area was designated as an EPA ‘Superfund' site in 1989. AFCEE is currently treating over 15 million gallons of contaminated groundwater a day, from plumes covering more than 4,000 acres on Upper Cape Cod. Data from over 10,000 wells and other sample sites is used to track cleanup progress and guide future remediation efforts. The program operates eight active and one passive treatment systems which have removed almost 6,000 pounds of contamination from the potential drinking water supply. GIS is heavily relied upon to track, analyze and summarize the progress of this massive effort. |
The Role of GIS in Determining Sediment Remediation Alternatives
Allison Glessner, Miranda Henning, Karen Merritt, Victor Magar; ENVIRON International CorporationPeninsula Harbour, located on the northern shore of Lake Superior near Marathon, Ontario, was designated as an Area of Concern (AOC) in the early 1980's. This designation was due to sediment contamination from historical industrial operations including a pulp mill and adjacent chlor-alkali facility. GIS was relied on during both the environmental risk assessment and sediment management analysis conducted for this site to: 1) delineate the areal extent of elevated mercury and PCB concentrations in the harbour; and 2) to estimate the area and volume of sediment warranting management to achieve acceptable risk reduction for human and ecological receptors. By mapping site characteristics such as grain size distribution, sampling point density, bottom slope, and the mass distribution of mercury and PCBs, GIS also played a role in defining the feasibility of various sediment remedial alternatives and estimating costs associated with each alternative. Although non-spatial factors such as community acceptance are also critical in selecting a final remedial alternative for Peninsula Harbour, GIS was an important tool in guiding the overall selection process. |
Delineating Public Water Supply Watersheds in Massachusetts
Robert C. Hames, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection
The Mass Dept of Environmental Protection's GIS Program is using the digital terrain data from MassGIS' 2005 Color OrthoPhoto project with ESRI's ArcHydro toolset to accurately delineate public water supply watersheds and protection zones. This poster highlights some of the steps used in the creation of the new watersheds, including the creation of new streams from the DEP Wetlands datalayer, the creation of a detailed digital elevation model (DEM), watershed delineation, protection zone creation, field verification for suspect areas, and final map products for distribution. The enhanced hydrologic data is planned to be input into the National Hydrologic Dataset (NHD) from USGS to bring Massachusetts up to local resolution. Approximately 50% of the state has been mapped at this level of detail, work is ongoing. |
Where New England Lives: A dasymetric population map for New England
Jeffrey W. Hollister, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Atlantic Ecology Division; Jane L. Copeland, Computer Sciences Corporation
Recent research efforts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency focus on the services humans derive from ecosystems. As humans are integral to the definition of ecosystem services, accurate information on the distribution of human populations is critical for this research. While data from the U.S. Census Bureau has proven to be invaluable, simply aggregating census geographies (e.g. block, block group, tract, and county) to more ecologically meaningful geographies (e.g. watersheds) may lead to bias in population estimates. Thus, more robust methods of redistributing population data, such as dasymetric mapping techniques, are needed. Most dasymetric methods focus on finer scales and require local information on population distributions, hindering application at broad scales. We propose a simpler approach for broad scale dasymetric mapping. We use ancillary data (i.e. transportation, land use/land cover, hydrography, etc.) to create a layer of inhabitable and uninhabitable land. We redistribute the U.S. Census Block Group data to our binary mask layer. We present the results of our mapping and an accuracy assessment in which we compare the original census estimates to the dasymetric estimates. Preliminary results suggest that our simpler method improves upon the spatial resolution of the US Census data and is applicable at broad scales. |
Tracking Regional Development by Impervious Surface Analysis
Donald Katnik, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife; Steve Walker, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife; Elizabeth Hertz, Maine State Planning Office
At NeARC 2007, we gave a presention on modeling connectivity of wildlife habitat. The greatest threat to habitat connectivity is unplanned growth and urban sprawl. The large spatial and temporal extents of development, however, make it difficult to quantify cumulative impacts and to model areas of future growth. Last year, the state of Maine was awarded a grant by U.S. EPA to develop a GIS method for tracking development. We will use impervious surfaces, extracted from 1-m color orthoimagery, to identify buildings, parking lots, and roads. Maine used a voter-passed bond to acquire this imagery from 2001-04. This data will provide a baseline raster of development. We then will use statewide, 2007 data available free from the USDA National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) to create a second data set. The differences between these rasters will show new development over a 3-year period for all organized townships in Maine. Conducting QC of the automated impervious extractions will be the most time-consuming step; we propose to use a network of volunteers, such as high school GIS students, to assist with this. If the process proves sufficiently accurate and reasonably inexpensive, we will encourage neighboring states to generate similar data to create a regional map of development. |
Health Indicators for the Housatonic River and Tributaries
Kirk Sinclair, PhD; Housatonic Valley Association
Health Indicators for the Housatonic River and Tributaries' compiles on one map much of the data that HVA and other organizations have compiled related to water quality and flow in the Housatonic River watershed. The maps is to be used in our work with town conservation commissions in determining best land use practices for protecting water quality, as well as convey to the public that HVA offers a variety of programs for assessing the health of the river. |
| PLANNING |
Flood Control Study
Atlantic County Office of GIS; Scott Dalton, Matthew Duffy, Melanie Ruff, Sarah Taylor-Deak
Flood hazard mitigation and flood control. A glance at the development of a comprehensive plan to identify areas of recurring flooding, develop mitigation strategies to address these areas of flooding, prioritize and then implement actions to alleviate areas of recurring flooding along Atlantic County's transportation network. |
Preparing for the Next Flood of 1955: Using GIS to Determine Routes of Exit in a Region known for its Rivers, Valleys, and Bridges
David Elder, Matt Fulda, Valley Council of Governments
The Lower Naugatuck River Valley is geographic setting with high ridges and deep river valleys that form natural barriers between the communities. Numerous floods over the past century have devastated entire neighborhoods and cities. Perhaps the most well known of these is the 1955 Naugatuck River flood when Hurricanes Connie and Diane produced flooding 25 feet above flood stage and resulted in 87 deaths in the region. This analysis uses 20' LIDAR, and ArcInfo's Spatial Analyst, 3D Analyst, and Network Analyst to determine which roads and which routes of exit would be accessible if a flood of this magnitude were to occur today. |
| RESEARCH/EDUCATION |
The Effects of Land-use and Land Cover at Varying Scales on Macroinvertebrate Communities in the Deerifeld River Watershed
Jason Saltman, Michael Cole, pHd, Green Mountain College
We are investigating whether different land-use and land cover types at multiple scales correlate with benthic macroinvertebrates biometrics as a measure of in-stream biological conditions. Macroinvertebrate samples from 44 stream reaches in the Deerfield River Watershed in Massachusetts and Vermont were collected and preserved for identification and analysis using modified EPA rapid bioassesment protocols. A geographic information system will be used to quantify land-use/land cover over a subwatershed scale, and two smaller scales, looking for relationships between macroinvertebrate biometrics and land-use/cover at these different scales. The smaller scales will be defined by buffer distances both horizontal from each data collection site and distances upstream from each site. Relationships between land-use/cover and macroinvertebrate assemblage condition as an indicator of stream health will be explored through exploratory multivariate and univariate correlation analysis to examine which land-use/cover correlate with in-stream biological conditions s indicated by macroinvertebrate biometrics. |
Climate Change, Sea Level Rise and Barnstable County Roads
Thomas A. Stone, The Woods Hole Research Center
Barnstable County (Cape Cod) is a glacially derived peninsula that is geologically young. As there is no bedrock above sea level, Cape Cod is dramatically affected by highly dynamic coastal processes: the wind, the sea, and storms. Annual erosion rates on the outer Cape are up to 3 ft per year, yet other areas are sites of net deposition.
The effects of climate change on Cape Cod will most likely to be seen as increased storminess and sea level rise. Even a modest increase in sea level over the next few decades will have wide ranging and deleterious effects on roads and other built infrastructure such as bridges, storm drains, and utilities.
Using existing GIS tools and DEM data, we estimate that about 37% of Cape Cod is below 10 m elevation. More importantly, 15% of Cape Cod is below 3 m and 10% is less than 2 m from current sea level. Although this appears to show a small area of Cape Cod at risk from a 1 or 2 m rise in sea level, we need to keep in mind that the most immediately damaging effects will be storm surges of one to several meters on top of average sea rise. Cape Cod has about 6,200 km of roads and about 15% of these roads are 3 m or less above sea level. Loss of the use of many roads, road repair, and other infrastructure threats are some of the anticipated problems due to predicted sea level rise. |
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