Maine Coastal Program Home Page | Maine Coastline Table of Contents

The Brave New World of GIS

When the phrase "cutting edge" is mentioned, Machias, Maine, is not usually the place that pops to mind, but the GIS department at the University of Maine is proving to be exactly that.

"We are partnering with towns to do a scenic inventory as well as strategic conservation planning. We are providing towns and organizations with technical expertise and capacity they wouldn't have otherwise," said Tora Johnson, director of the Geographic Information Systems Laboratory and Service Center at the University of Maine at Machias (UMM).

"It's a win-win for everyone. Students get work – and when we can grants, we pay them – and we help little bitty towns do things they couldn't otherwise do," said Johnson.

Scenic Inventory, UMM Style

A recent project by the department to map the scenic coastal inventory of Hancock and Washington counties won accolades and awards for its student participants.

Two groups of UMM students entered the Undergraduate Maine GIS Championships poster competition. One group was the overall contest winner, taking first prize in the science category and second in the service category. The second group won honorable mention.

"They won with the models they built to implement the inventory and assessment strategy laid out in the handbook. (See accompanying story, Value of a Great View) They converted the strategy and data into GIS," said Johnson.

The project was funded through the Maine Coastal Program (MCP) and carried out in conjunction with the Washington County Council of Governments (WCCOG) and the Hancock County Planning Commission (HCPC).

"I'm not aware of anyone who's ever done an inventory like this. Someone might have - but certainly not using Terry deWan's methodology," said Johnson. "We're very focused on marine applications in GIS which register a high level of interaction."

A photo gallery of the poster contest may be seen at:
http://www.megischamps.org/photos_eastern09.html

"Our summer intern, Derik Lee, took the models, added some other information that was needed, and did the desktop assessment of hundreds of sites over the summer," Johnson said. "He and Inez Lombardo did the binder. Staff of WCCOG and HCPC did the onsite evaluations with volunteers."

"Derik actually invented a process to stitch together panoramic views of the sites. There was a lot of innovation going on in this project that processed the inventory to take the methods and bring it up to date.

"Without that digital approach, it would have taken longer," said Johnson. "This is one of the most beautiful places in the world, so I knew there would be a great density of sites. I am sure the system could be even more efficient in the future."

One aspect that surprised Johnson was "how arbitrary the northern border is. The estuaries go far inland, some of the habitat is globally important."

"The Narragaugus watershed is a huge wetland that nesting and wading shorebirds use as an important stop-off," she added. "There are a lot of connections that reach way up."

A new look at shoreland zoning

Center students and Johnson, who is also a GIS instructor, created a GIS program to make a model that takes the shoreland zoning statutes and turns them into an 88-step GIS model, explained East.

"We have worked with her on a bunch of projects," said Judy East, of the Washington County Council of Governments. "The cool thing about her is her tremendous skill level, and her ability to teach introductory and advanced GIS classes. She's creating a great GIS department.

"It's absolutely first class," East added. "We have a really strong partnership with them."

East has worked with GIS before. "I've put my toe in it for 20 years. You can't be good at everything, but in this partnership, I can know I want done and she can do it.

"The draft maps for all towns in Washington County show where the jurisdiction of shoreland zoning apply," said East. The statute required a 1"= 2000 feet scale. Department of Environmental Protection maps were upgraded from Mylar overlays to digital, and the scale was changed.

"They need the maps at a scale so they can know where the resource protection areas would go," explained East.

The MCP paid the center to work with the towns. The guidance document was sent to them along with a shoreland zoning map.

"We got at least six towns to digitize their parcel maps. The Alexander town maps were 120 sheets. The base map dated from 1870," said East. Alexander went through six iterations.

"We used GIS modeling to do the shoreland layer for shoreland zoning, so we interpreted the statute into GIS analysis and data," explained Johnson. "There was no way to do 35 or 40 towns physically, without using our tools."

The center has been working on the shoreland zoning project for more than a year, but the process has been streamlined so that future use of the system will be even more efficient, said Johnson.

First, they send their maps to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), then to the towns themselves - which hold public meetings and make the changes that result, explained Johnson.

"The changes towns and the DEP have to make only take a few minutes with each map, rather than having to recreate the maps, as they would have had to before," Johnson said.

"After Beddington (the first town done), we automated the process, using a model-builder module in the software to create computer models and revise as needed, quickly and easily," she said.

A true service center

East and Johnson co-authored a paper that Johnson will present at a meeting of the Association of American Geographers in D.C., on the use of the iterative and interactive GIS model.

Part of the center's name includes 'service' and there's no question the center provides a service to the local region.

"The reason the center exists is that none of the towns or entities like WCCOG have the capacity to do this stuff," said Johnson. "They've been building comprehensive plans for years without a real sense of what is where in the towns. Now that's all changed."

Many other regions also lack the technical capacity provided by the UMM center, but that may change. Johnson is the principal investigator in an effort to foster a statewide GIS education system involving nine colleges and universities.

"The students are learning truly the application of GIS and the issues around getting maps into the system in order to be able to use them," said East. It's not always clear in school what you're doing something for, what you're working toward.

"This is really powerful."

PDFs of individual towns' interactive shoreland zoning maps may be seen and downloaded at:
http://www.megischamps.org/virtual_upload/SZ_PDF/

Back: The Value of a Great View | Next: Profiles: Judy East