Project Draft Proposal

Adirondack park land use and development plan map

Introduction

The Adirondack Park was created in 1892, due to the concerns of the water and timber resources of the region, and today is the largest publically protected area of land in the contiguous Unites States.  The park encompasses approximately 6 million acres, almost half of which belong to the people of New York State and has been protected by the constitution to remain a “forever wild” forest preserve.  The other half is privately owned land that is made up of homes, camps, farms, timber lands, and businesses. Recent events in the American economy have had a devastating effect on towns and communities across the country, and the Tupper Lake region in the heart of the Adirondacks is no exception.  A String of economic blows has left most of the downtown of Tupper Lake vacant, and drastically affected the population, shrinking it by one-fifth.  In an effort to preserve the integrity of the town and prevent it from becoming a ghost town, the Adirondack Park Agency, which governs land use in the Adirondack, approved a resort development project that would sit on 6,300 acres of Adirondack Park land in an effort to stimulate a sustainable economy and create jobs.  “The Adirondack Club and Resort”, would include over 650 units of housing, a ski area, hotel, marina and equestrian center, this project would be the largest ever approved by the Adirondack Park Agency. 

In order to assess the impact of development on protected wilderness areas, a detailed GIS model depicting land use in the Adirondack Park is needed.  Such a model would be a useful tool to examine impacts to the land through development and determine an acceptable level of development.

Objectives

This project will depict the outlines of protected open space and forested land, and relationship to areas that are zoned for development throughout the entire Adirondack Park to ascertain what the limit of acceptable development within the park is. A specified area of interest will be the Tupper Lake region, due to recent development plans in this area.  The more specific objectives include:

·         The proposed Tupper Lake Development plan location.

·         A comparison of the new developments and designated protected areas in the Adirondack Park, to that of historical development dating back to the last ten years.

·         determine the land cover types in the Tupper Lake Region

- A web map that can be used as a functional interactive student guide to navigate through Adirondack GIS resources for students with little to no background on the region.

Methodology

 The process of creating a web-based map using Arch GIS Online, by importing data layers from Adirondack Park Agency CD Rom with development zoning.

Data Sources

Shared Adirondack Park Geographic Information CD-ROM   ver.1.0

Data on the CD

All data on the CD is in the Universal Transverse Mercator projection, Zone 18, North American Datum of 1983

Data originator abbreviations:

ALSC - Adirondack Lakes Survey Corporation APA - NYS Adirondack Park Agency DEC - NYS Dept. of Environmental Conservation DOH - NYS Dept. of Health DOT - NYS Dept. of Transportation NFLI - Northern Forest Lands Inventory

NRCS - Natural Resources Conservation Service OFT - NYS Office for Technology ORPS - NYS Office of Real Property Services SED - NYS Education Dept. USGS,NMD - USGS, National Mapping Division

ESRI Data and maps [DVD]. (2006) Redlands, California: ESRI, Inc. [October, 2008].

RapidMap 2.2 [online database]. (2008) Rapid City, South Dakota: Pennington County – Rapid City GIS. Available: http://www.rcgov-gis.org/interactive.htm [june 6, 2008].

Work plan

            Week of February 20^th

·         Create first draft proposal

·         Awaiting delivery of Shared Adirondack Park Geographic Information CD-ROM   ver.1.0

Week of February 27^th

·         Import the Adirondack Park Geographic Information CD-ROM into Arch-Gis.

·         Create land cover types data layers within the Adirondack Park.

Week of March 5^th

·         Create Data layers of Proposed Tupper Lake development project.

Week of March 12^th

·         Create data layers comparing new developments to historic developments dating back ten years.

Week of March 26^th

·         Create data layers for protected wilderness area.

Week of April 2^nd

·         Have a completed and functional interactive web-based map of Adirondacks.

Deliverables

A Web map that shows the land cover types of the Adirondack Park, and layers depicting protected areas, and areas of new developments over the past 10 years. Also a student guide to be able to navigate through the Adirondack GIS resources