earthgridorbit.gif 16th New York State Geographic Information Systems Conference

Poster Abstracts

 

Croton Watershed Land Use Classification System
Josephine Amato, Westchester County Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Department of Information Technology, 148 Martine Avenue, Room 318, White Plains, NY 10601

A watershed is defined as the land around a body of water where all rain, snowmelt and other water eventually flows into a lake, pond, wetland, river or stream. Watershed areas are extremely sensitive to human influence.  The Croton Watershed is made up of approximately 12 reservoirs and provides drinking water to New York City, Putnam County, NY and Westchester County, NY.

The Croton Watershed Land Use classification System has been developed with the intent to utilize parcel-based information and reclassify lands within each watershed community to properly associate the use of land with environmental sensitivity. There are ten Westchester County towns within the Croton Watershed area; Bedford, Cortlandt, Mount Kisco, Lewisboro, North Salem, New Castle, Yorktown, North Castle, Pound Ridge, and Somers.

 

Internet Tax Parcel Mapping in Westchester County, New York
Xiaobo Cui, Geographic Information System, Department of Information Technology, Westchester County, 148 Martine Ave, Room 318, White Plains, NY 10601 [Phone: (914) 285-3781 Fax: (914) 285-5135 Email: xxc1@westchestergov.com]

Westchester County GIS has recently developed an Internet tax parcel map for Town of New Castle. The Internet tax parcel map allows users to view the tax parcel map and query tax parcel information interactively using Internet browser. The users can search for a property or adjacent parcels by parcel section block lot number, parcel address, or owner name. The users can also enter a complex query based on their own criteria to search the properties.

The poster will illustrate the user graphical interface of the Internet tax parcel mapping application, the results of search functions, including the selected tax parcel map and its related real property information.

 

 

Non-Point Source Water Pollution
Thomas Hart, Jr., Coastal Resources, New York State Department of State; Floyd Henderson and James Portolese, GIS Remote Sensing Laboratory, Department of Geography and Planning, University at Albany; Julie Coman, Coastal Resources, New York State Department of State

Remote sensing and GIS are being used to address many environmental management and monitoring needs. One of these application areas is the determination of present and future non-point source water pollution potential in coastal regions. This poster displays a spatial model designed to assist in such efforts. A nine class land cover map of a Long Island, New York watershed produced from Thematic Mapper imagery according to NOAA’s Coastal Change Analysis Program protocol served as a base. This classification was enhanced to produce an expanded sixteen category map of a watershed’s upland and wetland land cover from the Thematic Mapper imagery. These data were merged with digitized hydrologic soil group type and permeability data in two steps through a spatial model. The model was then enhanced and expanded by incorporating a distance factor to produce a map displaying current non-point source water pollution potential in the watershed by 25 meter square units.

 

Using GIS for Crime Analysis in North Castle, New York
Ana Hiraldo, Westchester County Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Department of Information Technology, 148 Martine Avenue, Room 318, White Plains, NY 10601 [Phone: (914) 285-4416 Fax: (914) 285-3269]

Westchester County GIS compiled a Crime Analysis Map for the Town of North Castle as part of the town’s GIS User Needs Assessment and Implementation Strategy study conducted in March 2000. The map served as a "proof of concept" for the integration of the town’s police database and ArcView. The map shows spatial relationship of a wide range of incident data, including criminal mischief, menacing, assault, harassment and larceny covering a three-month period from January 1999 to March 1999. The poster illustrates various views of the incident data overlaid with land use, and census data.

 

Utilization of GPS in Westchester County
Laura McGinty, Geographic Information System, Department Of Information Technology, Westchester County, 148 Martine Ave, Room 318, White Plains, NY 10601 [Phone: (914) 285-3888 Fax: (914) 285-3269 E-Mail: lam7@westchestergov.com]

This poster will be presented to describe how Westchester County GIS is using GPS technology for data collection. The county is currently utilizing GPS in capturing the locations as well as attribute data in areas such as bus shelters, manholes, and park trail mapping. GIS staff anticipate using GPS for several other applications including environmental and public health data collection, boundary surveys, and signage inventories. Examples of several county GPS initiatives will be illustrated in map form.

 

3-D Visualization of Groundwater Plume: GIS used to Enhance Public Understanding
Peter Nimmer, P.G., Bai Tian, P.G.,and Bruce Muchmore, EA Engineering, Science, and Technology, 3 Washington Center, Newburgh, New York [Phone: (914) 565-8100 Fax: (914) 565-8203]

The interpretation of ground-water data requires an understanding of the three-dimensional distribution of contaminants and the affect of temporal changes of ground-water flow and contaminant distribution. This is especially true for non-technical member of the public, who may have questions regarding contaminant distribution and other issues.

At Naval Air Station, Brunswick, Maine, a long-term monitoring program has been conducted since 1995 by the U.S. Navy to monitor changing conditions within a ground-water system impacted by dissolved-phase volatile organic compounds (VOC). Ground-water sampling has been conducted at 40 monitoring wells during 16 sampling events, resulting in the generation of more than 150,000 data records that contain location-specific chemical concentrations.

A geographic information system (GIS) project was completed to display spatial and temporal changes in VOC concentrations in ground water as compared allowable drinking water standards. This data has been made available to the public, and is used during public meetings to visualize sample results. Data was stored in a Microsoft Access database, and graphical presentations were completed by linking the data to ArcView GIS. The output of the GIS project included the generation of summary maps that improve the ability of data users to understand complex data sets "at-a-glance", and rapidly assess the changing distribution of dissolved-phase VOC concentrations. The summary maps are used to interpret the effectiveness of the monitoring well network and ground-water sampling program.

This poster presentation will demonstrate how GIS and database management tools were customized to generate 3-dimensional visualizations of analytical data that assist stakeholders and the public to understand the results of a complex sampling program.

 

NASA Affiliated Research Center (ARC) Program
Lindi Quackenbush, Kevin Riordan and Paul Hopkins, Department of Environmental Resources and Forest Engineering, SUNY ESF, 312 Bray Hall, 1 Forestry Dr, Syracuse NY 13210 [Phone: (315) 470-4727 Fax: (315) 470-6958 Email: ljquack@esf.edu]

In 1998, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) joined the NASA Affiliated Research Center (ARC) Program. The mission of the ARC program is to increase the competitiveness of American companies and organizations by integrating remote sensing and spatial information in business practices. The program provides any company or organization with an opportunity to investigate commercially viable ideas in remote sensing. This opportunity involves low financial risk on the part of the company. ESF can support a full range of applications in mapping, engineering, environmental science, resource management, transportation, real estate, and a variety of other fields.

 

Developing Fire District Boundaries on a New Westchester County Road Base
Greg Sullivan and Carrie Keneally, Geographic Information Systems, Department Of Information Technology, Westchester County, 148 Martine Ave, Room 318, White Plains, NY 10601 [Phone: (914) 285-3371 Fax: (914) 285-3269 E-Mail: ggs5@westchestergov.com]

Westchester County GIS, working with Emergency Services, has undertaken re-compilation of County Fire District boundaries to conform to a new, more accurate roads file. The new roads and district boundaries will be used in a recently implemented fire dispatching application. Originally compiled in 1993 for the Indian Point Emergency Preparedness Plan, the Fire District coverage was based on Census TIGER geography. This was adequate for a regional disaster plan, but insufficient for accurate fire dispatching. The old Fire District coverage did not include Sector boundaries, further limiting it’s utility for fire dispatching. The updated boundaries were derived using the County’s recently acquired NavTech roads file, and other County GIS data layers, where the boundaries followed these features. Individual district coordinators provided sector boundaries. The updated districts were then converted from Arc/Info to Intergraph format, for use in the I/CAD application.

 

Investigating the West Nile Virus with GIS (tentative)
Tong Zhou and Xiaobo Cui, Software Architects, Westchester County GIS, Department Of Information Technology, 148 Martine Ave, Room 318, White Plains, NY 10601 [Phone: (914) 285-3012 Fax: (914) 285-3269 Email: xxc1@westchestergov.com]

Westchester County GIS has been assisting health professionals in tracking the potential presence of the West Nile virus. One such indicator may be the presence of dead birds which may be carriers of the virus. The locations of reported dead birds are being mapped in GIS with density maps being generated to identify potential areas of concern. The GIS maps are being used by both researchers and study team members.

The production of this map was done using ESRI Spatial Analyst because of its spatial nature and the characteristics of the data. Utilizing the Density Function, the software distributes the measured quantity of the input Dead Bird point theme throughout a landscape to produce a continuous surface. The color differences of the surface indicate the various dead bird densities. Other geographic features were added to the map to provide reference and context.