Surveying, Mapping and GIS

• WaterWise (UK)
• Earth 911: Water Conservation
• 57 Ways to Conserve Water Around the Home
• Water Efficiency Magazine

• Greywater Irrigation
• Greywater Central

Jeff Thurston at Vector One has another great post speaking to one of his passions - sustainability.

He touches on the issues of infrastructure and zoning - and here, I wholly agree, we need to rethink our approaches to land use and infrastructure.

In antiquity, our approaches were geared toward communities, where people were able to work, live, buy, sell, trade, interact, worship, and essentially conduct all the activities they needed on convenient terms - typically one could traverse a small town on foot with ease, finding grocers, butchers, bakers, and any other needs handy. With the introduction of factories and mass production, along with mass transit, such as trolleys and buses, manufacturing and heavy industry was able to make an upsurge.

With the automobile, our definition of "convenience" began to shift, and our towns and cities became increasingly pedestrian-unfriendly. Add to this, the increasing pressures and consequences of the heavy industry and other uses which were less compatible with residential use, which ultimately led to segregation of land uses.

Ultimately, folks escaped from the cities, only to bring the cities with them, in the form of row after row of identical, cookie-cutter subdivision homes, spread over mile after mile of what had once been prime farmland.

Consequently, the pendulum has swung, from small, intimate community, to the scattered, impersonal, suburban sprawl of today. Perhaps the time has come for the pendulum to swing back - we have seen the rise of gasoline costs, and along with it, an increase in telecommuting and infrastructure alternatives.

The economic and cultural drivers are in place, however the regulatory and governance aspect still lags behind - with reforms to zoning and land use planning needed, along with different models for dealing with infrastructure relating to the "convenience factor"... Here is a place where I anticipate GIS having a definite and distinct role in demonstrating the cases and scenarios for future land use and development paradigms - and along with it, principles of land conservation and open space preservation.

Resources:

• Save Our Land, Save Our Towns: Thomas Hylton
• Natural Resources Defense Council: Sprawl
• Smart Growth America
• Sprawl Watch
• Greenbelt Alliance

The Green Belt Movement (GBM) was founded by 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dr. Wangari Maathai

GBM provides income and sustenance to millions of people in Kenya through the planting of trees. It also conducts educational campaigns to raise awareness about women's rights, civic empowerment, and the environment throughout Kenya and Africa.

How You Can Help
There are many ways to contribute to our work. Make a donation directly to GBM. Find out more about our Green Belt Safaris. Offset your carbon footprint by planting trees (forthcoming). Or buy Wangari Maathai’s books.

Just received this announcement from a colleague:

National Land Cover Database (NLCD 2001)
The U.S. Geological Survey, on behalf of the interagency Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC), is pleased to announce the availability of NLCD 2001 products for the conterminous United States. These products are web enabled for download from the MRLC website at www.mrlc.gov. NLCD 2001 products include 21 classes of land cover, percent tree canopy and percent urban imperviousness at 30 m resolution derived from Landsat imagery. NLCD 2001 will support a wide variety of users, institutional sectors and local- to national-scale applications with this updated land-cover data. Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico will be completed by December of 2007, which will then represent the first compilation of nationwide land cover ever produced at 30-meter resolution.

Great news for a wide variety of applications - I was just looking at a watershed application, myself, where this data will fit quite nicely.

I did a quick check, it's not yet visible in the MRLC map viewer, however the data is available via FTP - visit the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics site: http://www.mrlc.gov/