New York State Office of Cyber Security
Geographic Information Systems Clearinghouse
GIS Partnership Summary
Old Forest Preservation
2006
GIS Partnership Award Winner
Partnership Purpose and Goal:
Concern over how to preserve tracts of old forest in the Finger Lakes
National Forest (FLNF) has been a key issue in the recent revisions to
the FLNF's management plan. A number of stakeholders have advocated
strongly for the preservation of forest stands containing old trees, but
a current map of the oldest forest stands on the FLNF and adjacent lands
does not exist. We developed a collaborative project with the Environmental
Studies Program and the Finger Lakes Institute at Hobart and William Smith
Colleges, Friends of the Forest, the Finger Lakes Land Trust, the US Forest
Service, and Finger Lakes Forest Watch to map patches of old forest in
the FLNF and surrounding lands between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes. A
central focus of this project, in addition to developing and ground-truthing
a map of old forest, is building a strong foundation for continued collaboration
among forest planners and managers, faculty and students, and community
stakeholders who have not previously worked together.
Participants and Resource Contributions:
Environmental Studies Program, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
US Forest Service, Finger Lakes National Forest
Friends of the Forest
Finger Lakes Land Trust
Finger Lakes Forest Watch
Finger Lakes Institute, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Institute for the Application of Geospatial Technology
Mid-Hudson Service Learning Institute for Watershed and Environmental Studies
Date Partnership Began: June 2004
Completed: No
Deliverables:
Deliverables are in the form of increased
spatial thinking ability and facility with GIS and GPS technology among
all partners and a field-verified map of areas of old trees in the FLNF
region.
Brief Summary of Partnership:
Our partnership began
in mid-2004, when Friends of the Forest, a grassroots environmental community
organization, and the Finger Lakes Land Trust, a not-for-profit conservation
organization, began talking about overlap in their interests in well-thought-out
forest land conservation in central New York. Using historical land use data provided by the US Forest
Service, representatives from the Friends group and the Land Trust developed
maps of the National Forest, modeling areas of oldest forest growth, an
analysis never previously performed by the Forest Service. Inspired
by the power of GIS for this analysis, the Friends group representative
assembled a team consisting of herself, a college student, and an environmental
studies professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS). In
June 2005, the Mid-Hudson Service Learning Institute for Watershed and
Environmental Studies awarded our team a grant to attend the Conference
on Remote Sensing Education run by the Institute for the Application of
Geospatial Technology in Auburn NY, where we developed a community-service,
GIS-mapping project for a college environmental studies seminar. This
initial project design was further refined in discussions with Finger Lakes
National Forest staff and the GIS specialist at the Finger Lakes Institute. Working
with their collaborators, the HWS seminar students used GIS to analyze
historic aerial photographs spanning more than sixty years. The resulting
map of areas continuously forested since the mid-1940s was shared with
regional land conservation organizations and the FLNF staff, contributing
to forest management decision-making processes. Currently the project
is in preparation for field work to ground-truth the aerial photograph-based
mapping.
Additional Information Available On-line:
http://fli.hws.edu/gitahead
www.iagt.org/corse
Primary Contact Information:
Anne Wibiralske - Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
101A Lansing Hall, Geneva, NY 14456
Phone: (315) 781-3954
Fax: (315) 781-3860
E-mail: wibiralske@hws.edu
Secondary Contact Information:
Karen Edelstein - GIS Specialist and Stewardship Coordinator
Finger Lakes Land Trust
202 East Court Street, Ithaca, NY 14850
Phone: 607-275-9487
E-mail: karen@fllt.orgKathy Engel
Finger Lakes Forest Watch
P.O. Box 602, Trumansburg, NY 14886
E-mail: kae25@cornell.eduJames D. Hall - GIS Analyst
New Fields
389 Route 318, Phelps, NY 14532
Phone: (315) 521-5365
E-mail: jhall@newfields.com