Typical land use planning seeks to envision what a community might be like in ten to twenty years, when another round of planning occurs. This approach is largely reactive to prevailing conditions and forces, rather than proactively setting an agenda for sustainable and orderly growth over the long term future. By looking at planning horizons of 50 or more years, Dane County has recognized that the planning luxury of “open and undeveloped” land will not last. Within a few decades, all land in the county will either be developed or in some protected from development through various programs such as public acquisition, transfer or purchase of development rights, or farmland protection programs. To make sure that the best or most appropriate lands are slotted into these categories, we have developed a series of suitability models for ecosystem services, farmland protection, landscape amenities, and housing suitability. The results of these models are then fed into impact analysis models such as WhatIf? And CommunityViz to determine optimal mixes of future land uses and to describe the potential impacts of various scenarios.
Tom McClintock is the GIS Training Manager at LICGF (Land Information and Computer Graphics Facility) at the University Wisconsin Madison and has 17 years of “hands on” teaching of CAD and GIS. He also was the manager of the UW Arboretum GIS from 1990–2001. He is currently exploring various programs for land use suitability modeling, growth scenarios and impact analysis including visualization. Tom received his M.S. in Land Resources and his B.S. in Landscape Architecture from the UW of Madison focusing on using Remote Sensing and GIS for Natural Resource Management and Restoration Ecology.
Stephen J. Ventura is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Soil Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is Chair of the Department of Soil Science, Principal Investigator of the Consortium for Rural Geospatial Innovations (RGIS), and Director of the Land Information and Computer Graphics Facility, a geographic information system (GIS) research and technology transfer laboratory. Research interests include the implementation of multi-purpose land information systems, GIS and related information technologies for land use planning and management, and land records modernization. He has also worked on applications of GIS in environmental and resource management models such as non-point source pollution, groundwater contamination, precision agriculture, vegetation mapping, habitat evaluation, and invasion of exotic species.