East central Wisconsin offers small-town living with the convenience of large urban centers nearby and is known for its quality of life. A strong economy, low crime rate, and abundant natural resources and recreational facilities make the area a great place to live and visit. As is common with so many growing regions in the United States, east central Wisconsin is striving to balance opportunities for growth while planning a sustainable future for generations to come.

To protect its future, the state of Wisconsin enacted land use legislation in 1999 entitled Smart Growth for Wisconsin, which requires every village, town, city, and county in the state to be guided by a comprehensive Smart Growth Plan by 2010. The purpose of Smart Growth is to ensure responsible planning, restrict sprawl, and ensure the health of urban and rural communities. The East Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission is creating a regionwide framework plan to support compliance with Smart Growth for the 10-county area: Calumet, Fond du Lac, Green Lake, Marquette, Menominee, Outagamie, Shawano, Waupaca, Waushara, and Winnebago.

The Commission services a diverse 5,900-square-mile region with a population of more than 600,000 including urban areas, agricultural and forestry zones, rural towns and villages, recreational areas, and Native American reservations. Urbanized areas are industrialized and support heavy manufacturing businesses such as paper production and related support sectors. Urban areas are surrounded by rural landscapes that support a tourism economy and agricultural zones that sustain dairy and other farming. Development pressure is felt throughout the region. Population increase, agricultural process modifications, and other land use changes have fueled the desire to accomplish meaningful, comprehensive planning to manage current and future land use as well as preserve natural resources and the rural character of the region.

In support of Smart Growth, the Commission began creating a new land use inventory, interpreted from digital aerial photography using ArcInfo and ArcView software from Esri and IMAGINE OrthoBASE software from Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping, an Esri Business Partner. Esri's software has been the standard GIS software at the Commission for the past 13 years and was deemed applicable to this project. IMAGINE OrthoBASE was chosen following a review of several desktop aerial photography georeferencing products. It was determined to be the most feature-rich and cost-effective product.

The work for this project, performed on four Intel PCs, has been handled by the Technical Services staff at the Commission. The staff includes a GIS coordinator, a GIS project manager, an information technology specialist, several GIS technicians, and student interns.

The project addresses the lack of digital land use data in a consistent format, from a single time frame, for the region. "Four GIS base layers were used as input for the land use inventory project: parcels, road rights-of-way, hydro, and municipal boundaries," states Trish Nau, GIS planning specialist/land use coordinator of the Commission's Technical Services Section. "The basemap data was acquired from the region's counties along with some existing land use data obtained from a few municipalities," continues Nau. There were also 1,600 square miles of new, unreferenced digital aerial photography provided by Ayres Associates (Madison, Wisconsin), an Esri Business Partner.

The Commission began the project in 2000 and expects completion in 2004. The completed land use inventory is in use at counties performing town-based land use planning, such as Waushara and Shawano, with other counties soon to follow. "We knew this would be a large, expensive, and time-consuming project," explains Nau. "However, creation and distribution of the data by the Commission have set a foundation for thoughtful planning and are resulting in cost savings for local and county units of government by eliminating duplication of efforts."

The Technical Services staff began by creating a standard basemap for the land use inventory project, projecting the acquired GIS basemap layers into the Commission's coordinate system (Wisconsin Transverse Mercator 83/91 Feet) and converting the attribute data to match the Commission's GIS digital data mapping standards using ArcInfo. Next, the staff converted the acquired existing land use data and its attributes to the mapping standards and added them to the database.

"We spot-checked the acquired land use data against the new aerial photography as a quality control measure to ensure that it matched our coding system," explains Nau. "Field checks were also performed in some areas where we suspected there might be codes that needed to be changed."

The raw aerial photography was delivered without geographic coordinates and needed to be georeferenced (i.e., related to the Commission's coordinate system so it could be combined with the other GIS data). The nongeoreferenced data was displayed next to georeferenced data on the computer screen with IMAGINE OrthoBASE software. A series of control points was created by selecting a feature on the photography that was in both the georeferenced and nongeoreferenced photography such as a road intersection or building corner. Based on the points, the new aerial photography was georeferenced.

The Commission is one of the first planning agencies in Wisconsin to georeference its own aerial photography in-house. This type of work is traditionally performed by consultants. Advances in desktop software technology that allow technicians to perform this task are resulting in major cost savings for the Commission and its constituent counties' local units of government.

Next, a technician used ArcView to outline land use areas by performing heads-up digitizing on georeferenced aerial photography that was overlaid with GIS basemap information (parcels, roads, civil boundaries, and hydrology). The technician interpreted the land use, created a polygon to define each land use area, and assigned a land use code based on the Commission's regional land use coding scheme. The polygons were cleaned and topology was built. The resulting ArcInfo coverage was finally added to the GIS database for use in planning projects.

The Commission acquired new digital aerial photography for the 10-county area in 2000. "We plan to update aerial photography every 10 years to coincide with decennial census," says Nau. "This land use inventory will also be an important base for future projects. It is important to be able to quantify changes in land use over time."

Land use data is an essential component in comprehensive planning efforts and in solving current planning issues. Rapid growth in this region and the resultant land use changes create the need for orderly development of services such as roads, public facilities, sewer/water, and electricity. This land use inventory project, a basic building block of the planning process, will help ensure that the counties serviced by the Commission can successfully plan and manage the future.

For more information on this project, contact Trish Nau, East Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (e-mail: tnau@eastcentralrpc.org), or visit www.eastcentralrpc.org on the Web. For more information on spatial solutions, contact Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping (toll free in the United States at 1-877-463-7327 or outside the United States at 1-404-248-9000), or visit Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping at gis.leica-geosystems.com on the Web.