Coastal Services Center

There is still some debate in the coastal resource management community about the impact geographic information systems (GIS) will have on day to-day-decision making. Coastal managers in Connecticut have designed a customized, user-friendly GIS application that can assist even the most computer phobic staff person with their everyday tasks.

"We can already see the power and benefit of GIS to support better management decisions," said Ron Rozsa, coastal ecologist for the Connecticut Office of Long Island Sound Programs. "ArcView® is one of the most powerful software programs for compiling essential coastal resource information."

Connecticut designed the Coastal Resources GIS to support the state's coastal management program and coastal permitting programs, all of which are housed in the Office of Long Island Sound Programs. The GIS application allows permitting and coastal review staffs to view, analyze, and plot coastal resource and permit information, such as locations of tidal wetlands, submerged aquatic vegetation, and shellfish beds.

Rozsa said, "We're better able to analyze management applications, such as for a dock. Using the Coastal Resources GIS, we can determine how many docks there are in a region and how many of those docks are over eelgrass. We can also easily locate issued permits. Where it used to take anywhere from half an hour to three hours to search through the files, it's now down to minutes. And it's all very user friendly and loads quickly."

The Coastal Resources GIS was developed using the Environmental Systems Research Institute's (ESRI®) ArcView 3.0a software. He said they chose to customize ArcView because "right out of the box, it's difficult to use without a lot of training. Managers are concerned, and rightly so, about the expense and time required to train everyone in ArcView. You avoid that by working with a GIS specialist who can customize the product to your needs."

Rozsa said the goal of the GIS application was to create a "user-friendly GIS program where staff could sit behind a computer and with a minimum of training be able to work. We wanted to build it at the appropriate level for staff who are not computer literate or who are afraid of computers so they can go in and click here and there, and get the data they need."

The agency first received a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop a GIS application to help meet the needs of the coastal permitting programs. "Our permit programs are structured so that many activities are predicated upon permits that have already been issued. We have permits going back to 1939 that were in rows and rows of file drawers." He said when staff needed to track down issued permits, "they would have to pull out each and every folder. File searches could literally take hours." They realized that by digitizing the information, GIS would quickly show the spatial location of permits, and basic information such as names and types of permits issued.

A staff person, working in her spare time, began the lengthy process of organizing the permit files, digitizing the location information, and creating the database. Meanwhile the department hired a GIS specialist to create an application to remap and digitize tidal wetlands. Rozsa said they then determined a coastal GIS layer was needed and applied for and received a second EPAgrant. The specialist and staff from the Department of Natural Resources "cobbled together" the various GIS pieces to create the final project.

"The project itself was customized through time," he said. "It brings together resources and coverages access, such as tidal wetlands, eelgrass and shellfish beds,hydrography, and submerged aquatic vegetation."

Rozsa said the program opens to a view of the state and a basic table of contents. As the user zooms to a specific area they can access data layers, such as roads, annotation, and hydrography. A variety of customized buttons allows the user to rapidly locate project locations. For instance, when the user clicks on the "Lighthouse Button," a dialog box will display a variety of coastal themes, such as tidal wetlands, submerged aquatic vegetation, shellfish beds, and issued permits. "With a click of a button you can load the coverages you need for a particular site," he said.

A custom menu called "Pan To" allows the user to quickly zoom to named features, such as towns, rivers, beaches, and points. The program has a "Street Data Button," which lets the viewer zoom to a particular address, and a "Quick Map Button," which helps the user produce an 8 1/2 x11-inch hardcopy map of what the user is currently viewing. "It provides easy surfing," Rozsa said.

The project also allows viewing of digital orthophoto quadrangles, which are aerial photos that have undergone rectification, which corrects for distortion. He said after the user has zoomed to an area, they can click on the orthophoto to see "what the land really looks like." They made the orthophotos a separate data layer because the file size is so large it would slow down navigation of the program.

When the Coastal Resources GIS was completed in November 1997, the GIS specialist trained the office staff in groups of three, with training lasting about an hour and a half. Staff quickly took to the program and found it easy to use, Rozsa said. He noted a problem that became readily apparent is that only a few computers in the office ran ArcView, so time had to be set aside when staff could access the machines. "It was a real inconvenience. We realized people would use ArcView more if it were on their desk." The agency recently received funding from the Waste Management Bureau to purchase 23 new computers with ArcView, which is enough for all the program's staff.

"I would say in our office, GIS has come a long way. It provides us with more, simple ways to access electronic data. ArcView is one of the most powerful tools to organize coastal management data, and it's all conveniently organized, stored, and accessed. That's really the power of GIS," he said.

For more information on Connecticut's Coastal Resources GIS, contact Ron Rozsa at (860) 424-3616, or ron.rozsa@po.state.ct.us.