Trust for Public Land® is a national NGO whose mission is to conserve open space lands and promote parks in the United States and it’s territories. One of the central goals of the Trust For Public Land is to ensure that “Everyone in U.S. cities should have access to a quality park within a 10-minute walk of their home.” Working toward this goal requires accurate information on the location of parks and people in urbanized areas, a database that we call ParkServe®. In this presentation, Dave Highness will describe the ParkServe® database and the methods for maintaining and presenting it to the public.
Wildfire’s destruction of homes is an increasingly serious global problem. Characterizing home hardening and defensible space at the individual structure level may reduce loss through enriched understanding of structure susceptibility. However, improved data and methods are required to accurately characterize parcel-level features at scale. Here, we present a remote sensing and statistical learning approach to representing single-structure susceptibility in Ouray County, Colorado. Using LiDAR and property records, we characterize fuel attributes in the built environment. This method uses open-source data and may be used by communities to develop policies and mitigation programs.
Montana is the fourth largest state by area with nearly half of its population living in rural areas. These residents often face challenges in accessing childcare services and a recent survey revealed that this drawback impacts their workforce participation.
Using data from public datasets and geostatistical techniques, we assessed the relationship between population density, land use, and authorized licensed childcare in Montana. This methodology identified areas with service deficiencies and provided a comprehensive understanding of the spatial distribution of these parameters. This finding is critical for optimizing the allocation of services and overcoming these childcare capacity deficiencies impacting rural populations.
In 2019, Montana implemented a compensatory mitigation system for sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) habitat. Since then, Montana has experienced an increasingly complex landscape, posing unique challenges for the habitat mitigation system. The development of a geospatial model (Habitat Quantification Tool [HQT]) provides a non-biased, science-based, and stakeholder-supported process to quantify sage-grouse habitat. The HQT is used to establish a statewide baseline of existing habitat (i.e., HQT Basemap). Over time, impacts from newly implemented projects are used to update the HQT Basemap. By reviewing spatial changes in sage-grouse habitat over time, we can assess the efficacy of the sage-grouse mitigation system.
