The Green Visions Plan aims to create a greener Southern California. This map shows the plan's three-county area.
GIS map of Green Visions Plan region courtesy of John Wilson, GIS Research Lab
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An Overarching Vision
By Eva Emerson
July 2006
A collaborative project of the USC Center for Sustainable Cities (CSC), the USC Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Research Laboratory and state land conservancies, the Green Visions Plan aims to guide the strategic development of new green space in Southern California.
The project evolved from the recognition that “we needed an overarching vision for the region,” said CSC Director Jennifer Wolch, “in terms of how to do habitat conservation, watershed health planning and recreational open space development in a way that promotes multi-purpose projects.”
The plan encourages the thoughtful selection and management of land that can serve such multiple uses. The land conservancies involved, all state agencies, are the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, Coastal Conservancy and Baldwin Hills Conservancy.
The immediate goal of the Green Visions team is to build a series of interactive, online decision-support tools and maps of the region’s land resources. These data-rich GIS tools could be a boon to conservationists, urban planners, agency staff and community groups. The tools, as envisioned, will generate information and rankings to show the relative value of a specific land parcel as a site for conservation, recreation or watershed protection.
“When you click on [the map], we want all of this information to pop up that says, ‘This parcel is part of a habitat corridor that allows quail to get from one part of the city to another,’ ” said Wolch. “Or, ‘This parcel, if it were made into a park, would reduce disparities in access to open space for kids of color by 10 percent.’ ”
Green Visions co-investigator John Wilson, professor of geography and director of the GIS Lab where the tools are being created, added: “Our goal is to put customized decision-support and mapping tools in the hands of people who need them to promote projects that create ecologically sound and human-friendly urban spaces.”
“It’s not that no one has ever done anything like this before,” Wolch said. “But the tools are complicated and we’re covering a big area. It’s a challenge to create a data-rich tool that does on-the-fly analysis, and yet has the ‘look and feel’ that users now expect from things like Google Earth.”
The data on city parks collected by undergraduates, as well as county records that show individual property boundaries, are being added to the tools. The team expects to have a beta-version ready this summer.
For more about Green Visions' undergraduate data collectors, click here.
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