ParkInfo and CPAD

The organization that I work for, GreenInfo Network, has been composing some great web sites lately, and I wanted to take a post to let people know about them.  A while back we started creating our ParkInfo website and it has recently come to fruition.  At this site you can search throughout California for park names directly or search by addresses, cities/locations or zip codes to find parks in your area.  Once you click GO, the map zooms to that location and a list of parks shows up under search results.  Single click on a protected area on the map, it will highlight, and a bubble pops up with ownership and acreage information.

This site showcases one of our primary data sets here at GreenInfo, the California Protected Areas Database (CPAD).  CPAD is a collection of federal, state, county, city, special district and non-governmental agency protected lands.  You can learn more about this initiative and download the spatial data at our CPAD site.  In an effort to continually improve CPAD, you can help review the data and provide feedback on particular properties that we will use to edit the database before our next release.  And I’ll report back in the future about an exciting online property boundary editing tool that will help streamline the review process.

Both of these sites were developed using the Google Maps API.  TileCache and MapServer are being used to generate the custom basemap in ParkInfo and the parks layer.

Pennsylvania LIDAR

Rumor has it that Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources is flying all about the great Keystone State collecting and then processing LIDAR data.  They are creating 3.2-meter DEMs and 2-foot contours from the data, which kind of blows my mind, and is really impressive.  So far, it looks as though Luzerne County data are posted on the Penn State PASDA clearinghouse site, and rumor also has it that at some point, raw LIDAR data will be released.  So what that means is that you will be able to analyze canopy, understory, and ground elevations for some random forest in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania.  And this, I think, is brilliant.  Well done, Pennsylvania.