Urban Forestry Project of Sustainable Saratoga
Expansion of the Adirondack Wild Forest
Fragmentation of Habitat Sensitivity Analysis
Novel Cartography and Creative Spatial Analysis Assists Local Sustainability Group Assess Qualitative and Quantitative Attributes of Urban Forest
Working in conjunction with The Urban Forestry Project of Sustainable Saratoga, Xtra-Spatial Productions, converted hand-written inventory data on over 4,800 street trees in the downtown core of Saratoga Springs, NY to a rich spatial database. This database was combined with other databases (streets, census demographics, neighborhood boundaries, etc.) to create meaningful presentations that will assist in the creation of an Urban Forest Master Plan for the City.
The map on the left shows areas of the City that are lacking adequate canopy cover over the eight-foot Right-of-Way strip adjacent to City streets. Each side of the street is treated separately in these calculations. By presenting the data in map form, spatial patterns of deficiency and adequacy of the quantity of shade provided by street trees are easily seen.
Xtra-Spatial Productions has donated over 150 hours to this effort. Pro bono work such as this demonstrates the commitment to sound planning and environmental stewardship by James Zack, owner of Xtra-Spatial Productions.
Cartographic Production Illustrates Advocacy Positions
Working in collaboration with Protect the Adirondacks!, Xtra-Spatial Productions has produced a set of high-quality cartographic images to support the organization's efforts to communicate its position to its membership and to the public at large. Working with data from a variety of sources, and in various map projections, Xtra-Spatial Productions helped Protect! convey its recommendations to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Project-specific maps were produced from an evolving database of land use and conservation easement data, maintained by Xtra-Spatial Productions.
This map appeared in the quarterly report of Protect the Adirondacks! and was picked up by the Adirondack Almanack shortly thereafter. Below is an excerpt from the full-resolution map:
Forty Years of Development in Bolton, NY Compromises Integrity of Wildlife Habitat
In a study commissioned by the Residents Committee to Protect the Adirondacks (now Protect the Adirondacks!), Xtra-Spatial Productions digitized structures and roads from two sets of orthoimagery: one from 1966 and another from 2004. Buffers were created, with widths of 50, 100 and 180 meters, as specified by scientific literature. Buffered areas for 1966 and 2004 were overlain and split into three categories: Impact Zones present only in 1966, Impact Zones present only in 2004, and Impact Zones present in both 1966 and 2004. The percent of the town's area that in the Impact Zones were tabulated and compared between 1966 and 2004 in order to estimate the amount of habitat loss for each of the buffer widths to assess the sensitivity of the habitat model to parameterization of distance from road or structure considered to have an impact on mammalian species.
Below is a full-size excerpt from the 100-meter buffer map: