Map makers help chapter

The Angeles Chapter Conservation Committee has recently set up a Geographic Information Systems Committee as one of its subcommittees. The purpose of the GIS Committee is to provide mapping and other GIS services to conservation entities. I am the chair.

The series of events leading up to this started with the proposed Canyon Hills housing development in the Verdugo Mountains, which the Sierra Club and other organizations are fighting. The process is consuming many thousands of dollars and many hundreds of activist hours. During the fight, other land parcels in the Verdugos with almost as much acreage as Canyon Hills were quietly set aside as permanent open space by the city of Los Angeles and the Fonz Charitable Trust. The contrast made me realize that we could use our time and money more efficiently to preserve open space with a positive vision, instead of fighting each housing development as it's proposed.

The result was the Verdugo Mountains and San Rafael Hills Open Space Map, which is now in its third revision. It's a 36-inch by 60-inch wall map showing the open space in these mountains, with colors indicating private or public ownership. Open-space land parcels are identified on the map with numbers that refer to a separate gazetteer containing Assessor Parcel Number and ownership information.

We're in the process of showing the map to cities and conservation agencies, to start working on preserving the parcels we've identified as high priority.

The Angeles Chapter has produced several other maps of this sort, with volunteers providing data by marking up paper maps. GreenInfo Network, a conservation GIS consultant, updated the GIS data and designed and printed the maps. These projects produced good results, but tended to go over budget.

For the Verdugos open space map we decided to try a new approach: Sierra Club volunteers would do most of the GIS computer work. We applied to ESRI, the developer of the ArcGIS software used by GreenInfo Network, and received a license for the software as a grant. We hired GreenInfo Network to supply us with some basic data and serve as our GIS mentor. We then contacted cities and public agencies to get GIS data describing public and private open space in the Verdugos and San Rafael Hills. We imported this data into ArcGIS and edited it, and e-mailed the draft map files to GreenInfo, who improved their visual appearance and printed them out. The result was that we got to the first-draft stage for the initial map for about half the cost of previous maps, and we developed GIS expertise within the Chapter that will reduce the cost of future maps even further.

Some of the other projects the GIS Committee is working on are:

Ó An update of the map of Angeles Chapter groups. The map and zip code list in the Schedule of Activities have errors and don't include recent zip code additions.

Ó An update of the Santa Clarita greenmap for the Santa Clarita group

Ó A map of a proposed Los Angeles Coastal Recreation Area for the Chapter's wetland activists

Ó A map of the parks in Los Angeles for the Urban Environment and Parks Committee.

We can also provide quick ad-hoc maps for individual campaigns. Please direct any requests for conservation or outing-related mapping work to me. As we develop GIS expertise within the Chapter we'll be able to do more of these projects.

The committee currently has 12 members who have widely varied degrees of expertise with the ArcGIS software and GIS in general. We are seeking more members who want to learn and help with conservation mapping projects. Please contact me at 818-679-3141 or deanraff-at-arsnova.org if you are interested. You'll need a fairly powerful and up-to-date Windows computer, good computer literacy, and familiarity with mapping concepts, but ESRI has a good tutorial that can teach ArcGIS basics efficiently.