mapping

Environmental Conditions Online

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Your One Stop Shop for Maps and Geographic Information cteco.uconn.edu

CT ECO website on a computer screenTechnology has expanded the mapping world. No longer are maps static and flat. They are now interactive, zoom able and clickable. They allow focus on a location or a question and enable us to explore our backyard, town, state and world.

The Connecticut Environmental Conditions Online (CT ECO) website has become the de facto place in Connecticut to access statewide interactive maps. Anyone can browse natural resource layers, aerial imagery, elevation and more. In 2019, over 30,000 people explored Connecticut by visiting CT ECO, which is a partnership between Extension faculty from the UConn Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR) and the CT Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP).

Because not all (or probably even most) of those 30,000 people are Geographic Information System (GIS) experts, CT ECO is designed to meet the needs of visitors with varying levels of technical expertise. Alongside all of the maps is an extensive amount of complementary information in the form of Data Guides, Help documents and How-to explanations.

The simplest map access is through the Map Catalog, that contains over 9000 pdf maps that cover every town in Connecticut. These same maps can be purchased at the CT DEEP store in Hartford.

There are currently 12 interactive Map Viewers on CT ECO and the list is growing. Popular Viewers include the Simple and Advanced Map Viewers, both of which contain a long list of map layers mostly maintained by CT DEEP. The Elevation Viewer hosts the state’s elevation information in the form of highly detailed ground topography including elevation values as well as hillshade, slope, aspect and 1-foot contours. Also incredibly useful is the Aerial imagery Viewer that contains 12 statewide sets of aerial imagery between 1990 and 2019 along with six coastal and regional datasets.

Project-based viewers are topically focused. The Long Island Sound Blue Plan Viewer is one of the most recent, providing access to the long list of data layers that are part of the Long Island Sound Blue Plan. Other Viewers include Sea Level Rise and Coastal Road Flooding Viewer, the Aquaculture Mapping Atlas, the CT MS4 Viewer that focuses on stormwater and the DEEP Inland Waters Fish Community Data Viewer.

Finally, mapping professionals and enthusiasts can connect to CT ECO map and image “services” within their desktop or online GIS. The Map and Image Services page lists the over 100 available services.

Users, Uses, and Benefits

Responses to a survey conducted regarding the value of CT ECO revealed the breadth of users. They come from private business, state agencies (like Department of Transportation, Department of Economic and Community Development, Department of Safety and Public Protection, Department of Labor, CT DEEP and even the Office of Film, TV & Digital Media), regional and local government, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, utilities, citizens and more.

CT ECO is also used by hikers, landscape architects, land trusts and metal detectorist clubs (who knew?). The wide audience reflects the broad uses of CT ECO, such as preparing site assessments, permit applications and permit review, engineering projects, traffic plans, wetlands applications like identifying vernal pools, review of site conditions, identifying zoning violations, locating addresses, habitat suitability models, trail maps, forestry, coastal resilience, mining archaeology, appraisals, school projects and more.

It is difficult to put a dollar value on the services provided by CT ECO. Certainly having a central, statewide repository for mapping data, limited as it might be, reduces redundancy and increases efficiency. Many respondents from the survey report saving significant amounts of both money and time. Several users estimate saving over $100,000, with others stating that the time saved is “immeasurable.”

A State of Connecticut GIS professional said, “CT ECO has become the default location for accessing GIS data within the State of Connecticut. The work that the CT ECO staff has done to provide this data to the public has been nothing short of extraordinary.” It is exciting that UConn Extension is filling the critical need for so many different users and uses of Connecticut’s geospatial information.

Article by Emily Wilson

Free Environmental Webinar Series from UConn CLEAR

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social distancing
The UConn Center for Land Use Education and Research is offering free webinars. Here is the schedule for the next three weeks:
 
WEDNESDAY MARCH 25, 2020 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM
UConn Environment Corps: Harnessing Student Power to Help Towns
Chet Arnold, CLEAR Director
THURSDAY MARCH 26, 2020 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM
Emergency Changes to the Land Use Process in the COVID-19 Era
Sara C. Bronin
Thomas F. Gallivan Chair of Real Property Law, UConn Law School
Chair, Hartford Planning Commission
 
MONDAY MARCH 30, 2020 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Collaboratives & Utilities: New Options for Municipal Stormwater Management
Amanda Ryan, CLEAR MS4 Extension Educator
 
WEDNESDAY APRIL 1, 2020 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Moving with the Marshes
Juliana Barrett, Coastal Resources Extension Educator, CT Sea Grant
 
MONDAY APRIL 6, 2020 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM
From Maps to Apps: Accessible Tech for field scientists and citizen scientists alike
Cary Chadwick, CLEAR Geospatial Extension Educator
 
WEDNESDAY APRIL 8, 2020 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Statewide Lidar Elevation Points in Interactive, Color 3D!!
Emily Wilson, CLEAR Geospatial Extension Educator
 
Registration:
 
 
 
 

Connecticut Statewide Impervious Surface Map Layers

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By Emily Wilson

Originally published by the UConn Center for Land Use Education and Research

impervious surface map layer in ESRIWith funding from CT DEEP, CLEAR has acquired and made available on CT ECO a new statewide, high-resolution, impervious cover data layer. While acquired to support new stormwater regulations, the layer can be used for other purposes as well.

What is it?

Statewide, 1 foot resolution raster (pixel) data where each pixel is one of three classes (buildings, roads and other impervious).

Why do we have it?

The 2017 Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) General Permit regulation requires certain towns and institutions to calculate directly connected impervious area. To assist communities in meeting this requirement, CT DEEP funded the acquisition of the a statewide impervious layer (based on 2012 imagery) that may be useful in calculating directly connected impervious area and tracking disconnects of impervious cover.

How was it created?

A company called Quantum Spatial did the work.  They used 2012 statewide aerial imagery which has 1 foot pixels and classified it which means identifying all pixels in the imagery that represent buildings, roads and other impervious.  The rest of the pixels were excluded as they were not impervious land cover. In some places, towns and/or regional governments contributed detailed GIS data that was incorporated into the layer.

How do you get it?

The CT ECO website has a whole section devoted to the Connecticut MS4 Supporting Layers which includes the impervious surface data.

View. Take a quick peak at the layer. Or view it in context in the CT MS4 Viewer (look for Statewide Impervious Cover (2012) down a ways on the Layer List).

Connect. GIS users can connect to the map services of impervious surface. Three flavors are available.

The original raster data is available as map services in two different projections. One is in Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere (service called Impervious_2012) which is best for online mapping and web viewers.  The other is in Connecticut State Plane NAD83 Feet which is better for desktop GIS mapping when other layers are also in the Connecticut State Plane coordinate system (service called Impervious_2012_StatePlane).  The smoothed vector version (see formats section below) is also a map service in Connecticut State Plane NAD83 feet (service called Impervious2012_simplified_vector_StatePlane).

Download. GIS users can download the files.  Formats available described below.

What are the different formats?

The impervious surface data is available in several different flavors that all originated from the same base.

Raster.  The raster format is the original. Download by town (extended area*).

Vector Original. The vector format was created by taking the raster layer and converting it to polygons instead of pixels.  Polygons have area. Here, the polygon edges are still jagged because they originated from pixels. The outlines are shown as an example. Download by town in a geodatabase contain a clip of just the town boundary and one of the town extended area*.

Vector Smoothed. Through a fortunate turn of events, there is also a smoothed version of the vector. Here, the jagged vectors have been smoothed through geoprocessing methods. Download statewide layers for buildings, roads and other impervious.  Each is in a separate file.

* Extended area refers to a rectangular area larger than the town (detailed explanation here).

Telling Stories with Maps

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map imageEmily Wilson wrote a blog post for Map@Syst on the story maps being created by UConn Extension:

CLEAR’s Extension faculty have long used maps to educate land use decision makers and the public about Connecticut’s landscape and natural resources.  The Connecticut’s Changing Landscape (CCL) research project has been the foundation of the education.  CCL is a series of satellite-derived land cover maps for six dates between 1985 and 2010 (2105 is coming soon) that includes 12 classes such as development, turf, agricultural field and forest.

Although the CCL website has evolved with time and technology, it has always strived to integrate the graphic, quantitative and geospatial information in easy to access ways – virtually the same MO of the Story Map.  Story maps easily integrate text, multi-media like photos and video, graphics and of course, interactive maps in one, contained interface.

CLEAR’s extension faculty were energized and began to implement loads of CCL information into CLEAR’s first Story Map – Connecticut’s Changing Landscape.  It is an ideal way to boil down the inherently complex information including combinations of land cover categories, time intervals, derivatives and scales.

Read more…

Did You Know: Mapping the Industry

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shellfish mapShellfish aquaculture is a large and growing part of Connecticut’s agriculture sector, but site selection is a major challenge. Farmers cultivate oysters, clams and scallops in designated areas of Long Island Sound. Those sites are considered public property and are leased from the state. Farmers need to identify growing areas that are biologically productive for their crop while also considering the potential use conflicts or environmental interactions with their activity on those sites.

To help improve site selection for aquaculture, the Aquaculture Mapping Atlas was developed by Assistant Extension Educator Cary Chadwick, in collaboration with Extension Educator Tessa Getchis and the Connecticut Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Aquaculture.

The latest version of this interactive map viewer includes new data layers and functions. The viewer has updated commercial and recreational harvest areas, natural beds, and shellfish classification areas as well as a plethora of navigation, environmental condition, and natural resource data. Users can overlay map layers, draw new lease areas, and print professional-looking maps.

Did You Know: Drones at Work

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Mapping Great Gull Island with an Unmanned Aircraft

Joel and droneAssistant Extension Educator Joel Stocker spends a lot of his work and personal time documenting changes to the shoreline. In 2010 he contacted Helen Hays, asking if he could capture photographs over Great Gull Island with his homemade drone. She agreed. While on the island, Helen told him about the problem with invasive plants, and he connected her with Juliana Barrett.

Recognizing high-resolution aerials could be used to monitor vegetation management Juliana included experiments with aerial drone flights as part of a Connecticut Sea Grant proposal. In April 2013 the official Extension/Sea Grant flights took place, fully sanctioned by the FAA. Over 370 photographs were captured from a small four prop multirotor quadcopter, later processed using two different software systems, AgiSoft Photoscan and Pix4Dmapper. The result is a full high-resolution orthomosaic image of the entire island – a detailed tool for the habitat management plan. In addition the Pix4D software produced a full 3D topographic map, great potential for measuring erosion and the before and after effects of natural disasters like Superstorm Sandy.

Dealing in Imagery

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By Emily Wilson

Imagery

My extra desk has seen a steady stream of boxes – little and big ones, brown and black ones, even an iPad box (no iPad included).  One had old maps crumpled up to protect its contents.  Some have been dropped off and others have been part of a suspicious looking package trade at meetings across the state.  But they all contain the same thing – an external hard drive, cleared and prepared for all 571 gigabytes of Connecticut’s new aerial imagery.  Who do these boxes belong to? It is a wide range – private firms, federal agencies, utility companies, universities and municipalities to name a few.  And equally as diverse are the applications.  Mapping professionals use the imagery as background in maps and map viewers, to find and map roads, manholes, utility poles and other infrastructure, to find and map natural features like vernal pools, streams, vegetation and trees, and to detect changes on the land by comparing to older imagery.

But the imagery is not just for mapping professionals.  On CT ECO (a partnership between UConn CLEAR and CT DEEP), we provide the imagery in a range of ways to meet (almost) any level of technical ability. The simplest way is the map catalog, where you will find two pdfs for each town – one true color and one color infrared.  Just slightly more involved are the thematic map viewers where you can add other data layers or compare to older imagery.  The sophisticated user can connect to the map services in GIS software or ArcGIS Online.  And finally, for those mappers who want the actual data but haven’t brought your hard drive to me for the big copy, you can download the imagery as GeoTIFF tiles, MrSID tiles or town mosaics.

The download option is a first for CT ECO and for Connecticut and we are excited about it. It should make for easy and fast imagery access and will likely slow the drive trafficking in my office (and offices at DESPP, DOT and DEEP too).

Check out the imagery on CT ECO and, as always, let us know what you think.  And, by the way, boxes of chocolate, as well as hard drives, are always welcome.

More information and links to all the ways to view the 2012 Imagery on CT ECO