Case Studies

Natural Resources/Land Management Case Studies
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Washington: Remote Sensing for Federal Land Management
The Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is beginning to use remote sensing to manage federal lands within the state. The DNR has responsibility for 5.6 million acres of trust land, 3.0 million of which were given by the federal government when Washington became a state. The land trusts include 2 million acres of timberland, about 1 million acres for agricultural grazing land, and about 2.6 million acres of coastal land on Puget Sound. Read more

Soil Data in Minnesota - A Partnership Success Story
A 1994 survey of the Minnesota GIS community identified soil data at the top of the list of needs for new and improved data. The need was especially high for county governments and natural resource agencies. At the time, only one of Minnesota’s 87 counties had a spatially correct digital soil map and the rate of production for such products by the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS-then called the Soil Conservation Service) was one county per year. Something needed to be done to provide the required geospatial soil data. Read more

Army Corps of Engineers SHOALS Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Program
The Challenge
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is responsible for maintaining approximately 25,000 km of navigation channels and more than 600 ports and harbors. These channels must be assessed, often annually, for the movement of sand and sediment into shoals that impede safe navigation. Many channels require repeated dredging. Conventional hydrographic surveys using boats with acoustic fathometers are costly, slow, and do not meet all the USACE requirements for navigation and shore protection project monitoring. Read more

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument comprises 1.7 million acres of public land in southern Utah and was designated a national monument by President Clinton. This designation marked the beginning of a three-year process during which the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) worked with state and local governments and other interests to set up a land management process. To meet this goal, the planning team recognized that an important facet of the process involved making the pertinent spatial data accessible to the large community of data users and interest groups. Digital data presented electronically over the Internet were determined to best facilitate the provision of information in a quick, efficient, and effective manner. Read more

The Mississippi Delta: Natural Resources Management
In August 2000, the Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) agreed to be the lead agencies in a cooperative information-gathering effort regarding the natural resources of the Mississippi Delta region. This effort was intended to serve a variety of resource protection programs in the delta area, but was to be applied specifically to the pre-planning phases of a new highway slated to run through the Mississippi Delta: I-69. Read more

Natural Resource Man agement in Namibia
The quality of local involvement in natural resource decision support may be more important than the level of technical sophistication. In Namibia communities are experimenting with the use of paper maps generated from a GIS to manage natural resources at a community level (Figure 7-1). This work demonstrates the creation of long-term self-sustaining applications of geographic information to sustainable development. Read more