Mount Desert Island: Modeling for Development Suitability

Mount Desert Island, off midcoast Maine, is the second-largest island on the U.S eastern seaboard and home to Acadia National Park and four towns. The island experiences intense summer visitation and is under development pressure largely from the second-home market. As a result, local communities are struggling to retain their traditional identity, environmental quality, and landscape aesthetic.

Since 1987, College of the Atlantic has provided the island's park and towns with GIS maps to assist in planning. This map represents what we hope is a new era of GIS for the island, a modeling process that is both flexible and extensible allowing multiple stakeholder values to be represented. A value-based planning model founded on the work of landscape architect/planner Ian McHarg and outlined in Design With Nature (1969) was designed using ArcGIS Spatial Analyst tools coupled with ModelBuilder technology. The summary analysis model is a combined series of thematic submodels based on factors such as existing development, landscape ecology, soils, hydrology, and roads. Development scenarios have been created to provide a way to visualize and evaluate various options for the future.

Courtesy of Gordon Longsworth, College of the Atlantic.