New Jersey NGOs Experience the Power of GIS

Visitors to New Jersey's Island Beach State Park can use this map to appreciate the park's diverse marine ecologies when navigating the Sedge Island water trails.

Delivering Vital Services

New Jersey's municipalities are experiencing a steady growth in their senior citizen populations, and the city of Plainfield is no exception. The Plainfield Senior Citizen Center is dedicated to providing onsite educational and recreational programs as well as counseling and other services to its more than 1,800 active members. However, the center also wanted to help the city's homebound seniors who were unable to get to the center. So, in partnership with the city of Plainfield and Plainfield Action Services, the center used its ArcView software to map where these residents live so that services could be delivered to them. Redesigning bus routes and coordinating the local Meals on Wheels program and other home-based services are ways that GIS has provided innovative solutions to meet the needs of Plainfield's changing community.

Conserving Habitat

Along the northeast corridor, wildlife habitat is competing with human habitat on a daily basis, and an alarming amount of migratory bird habitat has disappeared from New Jersey's landscape over the last 25 years. The New Jersey Audubon Society is integrating the latest in technologies—Doppler radar and GIS—to delineate important habitat areas for migrating songbirds. Because songbirds are nocturnal migrants, it is difficult to track their movements using conventional methods. Overlaying composite radar images with land use/land cover data in ArcView, biologists are able to identify areas where birds are resting and feeding by detecting the precise moment of liftoff. This data helps the New Jersey Audubon Society make its case for the protection of these important stopover areas.

Planning for Smart Growth

On this Audubon Society map, orange represents migrating songbirds detected by Doppler radar overlaid on forested wetlands (blue) and forested uplands (green) to delineate a critical stopover habitat in central New Jersey.

Low-density development or "sprawl" brings with it a host of problems for New Jersey's communities including loss of open space, traffic congestion, and degradation of air and water quality. To counteract sprawl, local planning processes need to consider the impact of development on transportation and on public water, sewer, and natural resource systems before decisions are made. This is the philosophy of the Regional Planning Partnership (RPP), a nonprofit, nonpartisan, civic action group located in Princeton, New Jersey. RPP's Goal Oriented Zoning (GOZ) initiative supports expanding development in existing growth areas and optimizing natural resource conservation. Using ArcView, RPP developed GOZ, a GIS-based computer program that calculates the build-out impact of existing zoning ordinances and enables users to construct and test alternative zoning scenarios.

Creating Recreational Opportunities

We hear a lot about how New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation. But what we don't hear enough about is how local nonprofit groups are working to enrich the quality of life by helping to preserve and provide access to the state's extraordinary natural resources. Two such organizations, the Great Swamp Watershed Association and Save Barnegat Bay, both have used ArcView to create trail mapping through the unique geographies of their respective backyards.

In Morris County, the Great Swamp Watershed Association is assisting the Morristown Environmental Commission's efforts to establish a section of the Patriots Path in northwest New Jersey that will link historic Speedwell Lake to the Morristown, New Jersey, transit station. This link will provide residents with opportunities for passive outdoor recreation and allow commuters and shoppers to walk or bike to the train for direct service to midtown Manhattan in New York City. Save Barnegat Bay has delineated and mapped routes through the Sedge Islands of Island Beach State Park on the New Jersey coast, making this marine ecosystem accessible for kayaking and canoeing. Both of these groups used ArcView to benefit their constituencies and help boost local tourism.

Mapping City Neighborhoods

After the North Camden Land Trust received a copy of ArcView through the NGO program, two dedicated staff members enrolled themselves in an Introduction to ArcView class. Then, because of the financial problems and time constraints that typify the day-to-day struggles faced by many NGOs, data collection was put on the back burner.

Several months later, a group of students from the University of Pennsylvania's Urban Studies Department visited North Camden to learn firsthand about the Land Trust's efforts. One of the students negotiated an internship to help develop the organization's GIS capability by coordinating a group of volunteers to collect the data needed to map North Camden's neighborhoods. Information on housing stock, vacant lots, neighborhood parks, retail locations, and industrial sites was gathered and entered into databases. Esri technology translated the data into images that could be used by Land Trust staff to chart, map, and assess their progress in North Camden and then plan for tomorrow based on an accurate picture of today.

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