Abstract

A New Parks and Trails Plan for San Juan County
Track: Urban and Regional Planning
Authors: Matthew Stevenson, Breece Robertson

Sparsely populated and characterized by rolling hills, fertile farmland, forested hillsides, and miles of marine shoreline, the San Juan islands comprise a rural County with an economy based on recreational tourism, second-home development, and the retirement industry. The County's new plan for parks, trails, and natural areas incorporates a comprehensive inventory of land ownership, a classification of existing facilities, an analysis of community needs and opportunities, and a roadmap for implementation.

We used ArcGIS to: compile a spatial database of all of the County's lands with an emphasis on parks and open space, produce the first comprehensive set of public lands maps for the islands, identify potential corridors for expanding the trails network, and identify conservation opportunity areas. We ran parcel-level analyses with Network Analyst to determine the level of access to beaches and other marine facilities, identifying underserved populations on each island.