www.wellsreserve.org/news/20070104_mcpi.htm

WELLS RESERVE EXPANDS ROLE AS SOUTHERN MAINE MAPPING CENTER

WELLS, MAINE - The Wells Reserve has been selected by the Maine Coast Protection Initiative as the Mapping and Technology Service Center for southern Maine.

The Wells Reserve's new role as a GIS Service Center expands its ability to provide maps, support, and training to those conserving land from Kittery to Cape Elizabeth.

The Wells Reserve recently offered its first workshop as a Mapping and Technology Service Center. In the GIS Mapping for Land Trusts workshop, GIS specialists Susan Bickford and Matthew McBride showed members of the southern Maine land conservation community how to use free software to make their own maps from data bundled and shared by the Wells Reserve.

ArcReader and Google Earth are mapping programs that can be freely downloaded. With these programs and the data bundle provided at Wells Reserve workshops, land trusts can now produce their own custom maps with powerful information and extraordinary detail.

The GIS Mapping for Land Trusts workshop attracted seven participants from six conservation organizations in the service region.

The workshop was the first in a series of tutorials being offered by the Wells Reserve. GIS Mapping for Land Trusts will be repeated in January and February. Other upcoming workshops will concentrate on using global positioning systems (GPS), aerial photographs, and user-defined data layers.

The Wells Reserve GIS Service Center is funded in part by a grant from the Maine Coast Protection Initiative, a coalition of over 70 coastal organizations founded by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Maine State Planning Office, Land Trust Alliance, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coastal Services Center.

For nearly a decade, the Wells Reserve geographic information systems (GIS) center has been collecting and sharing digital parcel maps, aerial photographs, satellite images, conserved lands maps, rare wildlife and plant occurrence data, and the other data that make maps useful.

The Reserve has produced hundreds of maps at the request of scientists, citizens, resource managers, students, and other coastal decision-makers throughout southern Maine.

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