GIS Is Where It's At
Smart Maps Advance Coastal Decision Making

David Hart changes the way people view problems—and solutions—along Wisconsin’s shorelines of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. In workshops around the state, he shows local government officials and others how geographic information systems (GIS) can help them analyze information about zoning ordinances, property lines, floodplains, bluff erosion, nonpoint source pollution, and other location-oriented information.

"They’re like smart maps," Hart says of the images glowing on his computer screen. "GIS software links maps to databases. This lets you do things like click on a certain property, have the relevant language in the zoning ordinance pop up, and draw the required setbacks from the shore. Or you can visualize how close buildings are to the bluff edge and quantify the hazards they face."

Hart is the GIS Specialist for UW Sea Grant’s Advisory Services team. His workshops are part of the Wisconsin Coastal GIS Applications Project, a cooperative venture of Wisconsin Sea Grant and the Land Information and Computer Graphics Facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hart looks forward to further developments in the project. "The eventual goal is to have all this information in a dynamic, distributed system that connects a whole region," he says. "That region could be a small watershed that spans county boundaries or perhaps someday the entire Great Lakes basin."

Hart’s efforts build on 30 years of Wisconsin leadership in harnessing the power of computers to solve land use problems, according to Al Miller, UW Sea Grant Assistant Director for Advisory Services. Two decades ago, Miller was involved in an influential study that estimated that $78 million in taxpayer dollars supported an inefficient system of land records that had not changed much since the early 1800s. This assessment of the public investment in land records, especially at the local government level, stimulated the modernization of land records in Wisconsin.

However, the state must overcome many obstacles before modernization becomes reality in local governments, according to Hart. The obstacles are not always technological, he says—many are organizational. "Many local governments are only now beginning to face questions about sharing information with other organizations, recovering the cost of modernizing, and a host of other institutional issues. These are the biggest challenges to realizing the full power of GIS in land use decision making."

For more information, see the Web site of the Wisconsin Coastal GIS Applications Project.  Or call David Hart at (608) 263-5534 or email him at dahart@facstaff.wisc.edu

- John Karl

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Last updated 28 March 2000 by Karl
All contents copyright 1999 University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute

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