Managing South Florida's Extensive and Delicate Coastal Environment

GIS Instrumental as Florida's Marine Resource Information System (FMRIS) Brings Data Analysis to Decision Makers

Florida, nearly surrounded by the sea, has some of the most diverse and economically important coastal and marine resources in the world including the most extensive living coral reef system in the continental United States. City planners, business professionals, and others have to weigh their decisions based on how they might affect the environment.

The problem facing south Florida, in particular, was the fact that much of the information needed to make critical planning decisions was held in many formats and located in many different agencies. With this in mind, the South Florida Regional Planning Council (SFRPC), with grant support from the State Department of Community Affairs (DCA), developed Florida's Marine Resource Information System (FMRIS), a GIS application that holds information on coastal resources in one repository.

FMRIS Requires Little or No GIS Training
GIS technology gives the FMRIS application user the ability to draw an area of interest within various coverages, each displaying a particular set of data, and drill down through those coverages to view what factors are present for the given area. For instance, the user can see what endangered species, if any, reside within this region; generate a map based on the information; and view regulatory information such as statutes and laws that affect the area.

Here is an example of how FMRIS might be used: A request for development approval is sent to the SFRPC for review. The person sending the request wants permission to build a single-family dock in the Florida Keys. Before a decision can be made, the site for the proposed build must be studied to determine whether it is suitable for this type of development.

"FMRIS is oriented for end users--people who understand their job and the decisions they have to make, but who are not direct data manipulators," says Dr. Larry West, assistant professor of management information systems at the University of Central Florida (UCF), the specialist in decision support systems who developed the interface for the GIS. "What this project demonstrates is that you can get GIS all the way down to the decision maker's desktop without making him or her a GIS guru."

The FMRIS application utilizes ArcView GIS as its GIS engine and Visual Basic as the front-end interface.

"Before FMRIS was in place, a person trying to accomplish a task would have to go gypsying around to various regulatory agencies to find the same information that is now maintained in one place," says West. "The big goal was to cut down on what often amounted to thousands of dollars in investigation costs in the preparation of permit applications and their subsequent reviews."

State, county, and municipal agencies as well as private organizations contributed data that were put into one common, searchable projection.

The information elicited came in the form of tapes, diskettes, CD-ROMs, and database files. West says that data conversion was helped by the fact that most government agencies that supplied data were already ArcInfo users.

"I would estimate we brought in data produced from perhaps as many as 50 completely different agencies," says West.

Long-Term Goal
While the data set maintained in FMRIS is on Dade, Broward, and Monroe counties located in southern Florida, the hope is that the FMRIS database will grow to include information for the entire State of Florida, which totals 60 counties. "We are currently seeking additional funding to continue the development of the system and to expand its use to a State-wide system, which was the State's purpose when it was originally funded," said Dick Ogburn, project manager at the SFRPC.

"FMRIS will manage any data," says West. "The data that are in it now happen to be marine-related, but it will absolutely handle anything."

For more information contact Dick Ogburn, South Florida Regional Planning Council, 3440 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 140, Hollywood, Florida 33021 (tel.: 954-985-4416, e-mail: rogburn@sfrpc.com), or Larry West, College of Business, UCF, Orlando, Florida 32816-1400 (e-mail: lwest@bus.ucf.edu).