In Fall 1995, the Nevada Land and Resource Company ("NLRC") purchased 1.4 million acres of land from the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company in northern Nevada's Humboldt River Valley. The land is distributed within 9 counties and has a wide variety of existing and potential uses including urban development, minerals extraction, water resource development, geothermal energy production, and oil and gas development. As part of the pre-purchase evaluation, NLRC's GIS and natural resources consultant, Integrated Water Technologies, constructed a GIS database of land targeted for purchase. The database includes information on the location of sections with saleable land; corresponding mineral leases; Public Land Survey System ("PLSS") boundaries; major infrastructure; topography; water-related features including regional hydrographic basins; and regional land use, land ownership, and natural resources. Using GIS tools, the database provided critical information for: Evaluating existing mineral lease rights associated with the saleable land; Identifying the proximity of saleable land to known locations of geothermal wells and springs, infrastructure, urban areas, oil and gas wells, mines and geologic rock types; Comparing lists of saleable land holdings developed by several different groups; Identifying water resources administered by the Nevada State Engineer in 42 hydrographic basins containing the saleable lands; Categorizing rock types for regions with saleable lands; and Generating maps of land holdings in the context of related leasing and resource information for use in the purchase negotiations. Evaluations performed using the GIS database gave NLRC opportunity to address data discrepancies and concerns of several interested parties in a systematic manner, with great flexibility for integrating different data types in a common GIS environment. The database will continue to be used for management of the land and related natural resource assets acquired by NLRC.
A geographic information system (GIS) has traditionally been used as a way for organizations to create, manage and analyze spatially referenced data in highly structured ways. Many planners, however, avoid GIS because the way they analyze data (or the way they perceive their analytic techniques) is not accommodated by the standard GIS toolkit. This paper focuses on the needs of urban designers, and argues that what urban design is about--understanding the urban realm by finding patterns in the landscape--is theoretically well suited to the adoption of GIS technology. Therefore, the problem is to create tools that serve this aspect of the planning profession. Two main areas emerge as critical. One is creating a toolkit of standard sketch planning functions that takes advantage of the ability of TIS to integrate numerous and disparate data sources. The other involves building into the system a level of customization demanded by the creative professionals engaged in urban design. Using ArcView version 2 as the starting point for our GIS interface, a prototype pattern finding application is created. The goal of this application is to allow the designer to combine their knowledge of the area with the analytic power of GIS to discover hard to find patterns in the city. The ability of GIS to answer questions that are important to urban designers is tested by applying the techniques Kevin Lynch espoused in The Image of the City (1960) to the City of Boston, Massachusetts. In particular, we try to find nodes (concentrations of activity) using only digital data.
Local governments have been seeking effective methods to track development activities taking place in their jurisdictions for years, yet not many of them have been successful, mainly because of the large volume of development activities and limited resources to track them. As rapid urban growth mostly happens in the unincorporated areas surrounding a metropolis, the burden of growth management often falls to the county governments in these areas. The purpose of this paper is to share with the GIS community the experience the Polk County Planning Division has gained from its development-tracking practice using GIS (ArcInfo) and RDBMS over the recent years. While GIS is mostly employed to deal with spatial/geographic information, RDBMS is one of the most widely used software to collect, store, and analyze development-tracking data among local governments. The conclusion drawn from this paper will encourage cooperation between GIS managers and database administrators in their efforts to bring both systems together to track land development activities.