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Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests

Saving Special Places is a regional strategic conservation planning initiative of the Society for the Protection of NH Forests designed to locate new reservations in rapidly urbanizing southeastern New Hampshire.

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Business Problem

The specific land protection objective is to establish two, large (500+ acres) forest reservations strategically located to maximize a range of natural resource conservation values and also to serve the greatest number of population centers in the region. The GIS modeling routine draws from 25 natural resource data factors including forest soils productivity, large contiguous forest blocks, wetland and riparian zones, prime agricultural soils and cropland, drinking water supply lands, wildlife habitat and corridor data, and regional scenic resources. These co-occurrence of these data are mapped using conventional data factor overlay techniques, but the scoring scheme is based on a Delphi process method which facilitated staff team consensus-building on relative importance values, while also removing bias.

Further stratification of the co-occurrence values using statistical analysis is coupled with extended GIS processing, e.g., “proximity filters” relative to conservation lands linkages and accessibility from population centers to enhance the identification and isolation of only the highest-scoring candidate siting areas with sufficient acreage for new reservations. The study also yields a valuable by-product of secondary, but significant conservation priorities important to communities and local land trusts. Thus, a regional framework for leveraged land conservation partnerships emerges from the GIS analysis, in addition to the best reservation siting opportunities for the Forest Society.

A second phase of GIS mapping and co-occurrence analysis is focused on selected candidate siting areas with a goal of identifying specific parcels of land for protection. Since these siting areas typically span two or more communities, input from municipal land use boards, local land trusts, and regional planning agencies was sought to augment the broad-scale environmental data factors noted above. Localized data factors mapped included land ownership patterns derived from tax parcel data, town-designated scenic roads and places, important historic/cultural sites, locally important biodiversity elements, and trail systems not yet in the statewide database.

Technology Implemented

This project was accomplished using ArcView 3.3 and the Spatial Analyst extension to allow processing of all data in grid format, which enhanced speed of processing while minimizing file size. Other extensions critical to the project include XTools, Spatial Tools, and ArcPress. All work was done on an HP Notebook PC with Pentium III 1066MHz cpu and 248 MB RAM and Windows XP Professional.

Development Team Biography

The project was managed and implemented by Dan Sundquist, research director for the Forest Society. Dan's background in landscape architecture and environmental planning contributed to the