GIS Staff Outline Accomplishments for 2013
- Details
Windham Regional Commission GIS staff members Jeff Nugent and Sarah Linn worked on many projects during 2013. Some of the highlights are presented below.
This year, we completed culvert inventories for Brookline, Somerset and Vernon, and are in the process of working on Grafton, Jamaica, Marlboro, Newfane, Londonderry and Winhall.
We completed field work for sign inventories of Grafton, Guilford, and Windham, and will use the winter months to process the data and create maps.
Sarah performed annual bike-ped counts and Park & Ride counts at several locations in Brattleboro, Dummerston, Westminster, and Dover.
Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation contracted with WRC to digitize parcels enrolled in the state’s Use Value Apprasial Program in five towns: Brattleboro, Brookline, Londonderry, Putney, and Stratton. This effort will continue in 2014 with eleven more towns being completed.
This year’s Federal Clean Water Act Section 604b funding was used to document damage from Tropical Storm Irene. For the entire region, we created an inventory and map of homes and businesses that were destroyed, and an inventory and map of bridges and major culverts that were destroyed or heavily damaged. For the Whetstone Brook, Rock River, and Marlboro Branch, WRC created an inventory and maps documenting the locations of damaged and destroyed buildings, damaged and destroyed bridges and culverts, bank erosion, and flood channels.
Our support of towns’ planning efforts included starting work on a series of updated town plan maps for Halifax and Westminster, and a draft series of new town plan maps for the Town of Athens. We continued to help Dummerston update their zoning map and land use map, and finalized proposed zoning maps for Weston, Wilmington, and Whitingham. We assisted the towns of Brattleboro, Whitingham, and Wilmington by providing maps for their village center or downtown designation applications to the State of Vermont.
Since many members of the public would like to access parcel data digitally but don’t have GIS software, we converted all our available parcel data to a format the can be used in Google Earth, and made these data accessable on our web site.
We began working with Wilmington’s Trail Committee on a map series for the Valley Trail, and created detailed village maps of Londonderry and Jacksonville.
Finally, under the category of both fun and education, Sarah attended the NorthEast Arc User’s Group conference in Saratoga Springs, NY, and Jeff again returned to Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park to volunteer his GIS and GPS skills for the Park Service.
