Optimizing Community Efforts With GIS
Description
Many smaller communities are limited by budgetary, personnel, and/or software constraints in their ability to deploy and collect spatial data specific to their community. Often such data are required to support other community initiatives and projects. The goal of this project is to provide a proof-of-concept for supporting a local community in gathering spatial data relevant to their needs. Specifically, as part of the Tree Planting Program in Cortland, NY, there is a need to survey and inventory previously planted trees. To make this process more efficient, we created a custom application with ArcGIS software that can collect and store spatial data relevant to tree plantings. In future surveys, this app could be used by volunteers or citizen scientists to reduce the cost of time-consuming data collection. Community-collected data is then reviewed by a professional arborist to verify tree species and finalize the inventory.