SUMMARY

Based in Sudbury, Massachusetts Sudbury Valley Trustees carries out its mission, to protect wildlife habitat and the ecological integrity of the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Rivers Valley for the benefit of present and future generations through land acquisition and stewardship, advocacy and education, in partnership with towns, watershed associations, and other environmental organizations within the greater Concord River Basin, as well as with individuals and businesses.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES:

SVT is using GIS to maintain an up to date inventory of SVT managed lands. In addition they are using regional open space, regional environmental and municipal parcel data in order to expedite land protection planning and stewardship of Sudbury Valley Trustees managed lands. GIS is also being utilized to better communicate SVT’s work and mission to the public.

THE STORY:

SVT has effectively integrated GIS into it's operation in a number of different ways. First, they have built a simple GIS database of all of their land holdings with current information about each property. This allows them to quickly and accurately determine total acreage of their overall holdings and each individual holding.  This database is updated by trained staff and is easily kept current as new lands are acquired or new information about a property becomes available.

Building upon this property database they have also created detailed maps for each property displaying information such as trails, buildings, topography, roads, streams, lakes, etc.  Most of this information is freely available public data.  These basic maps were then exported out of GIS in two different formats, one for a quick preview from their website and another for a downloadable PDF map that can then be printed out by interested members.

LESSONS LEARNED:

The use of GIS by staff and volunteers has enabled us to quickly and cheaply produce materials that can help to inform their members and potential members of the work that they are doing.  It drastically improves their ability to update data in-house and provides an excellent, easily referenced base of information on their land holdings.  

CONTACTS:

Dan Stimson, dstimson@svtweb.org