Introduction

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can be an effective public participation and planning tool for natural resource and community development educators, even in rural places. Educators at the Center for Land Use Education (CLUE) employed GIS in a town hall setting to engage local plan committee members to identify and map important land resources for planning and management in Ashland County, Wisconsin. This article will describe that case study and explore the successes and lessons learned from an educator�s perspective. We hope that after reading this article, extension outreach educators and other plan professionals will consider applying GIS as a tool to foster education and public involvement.

In 2003, Ashland County and participating municipalities received funding from the Wisconsin Department of Administration to develop several comprehensive plans � one county plan and 15 municipal plans. A private consulting firm was hired to facilitate the project and write the plans. CLUE, a University of Wisconsin Extension center, with a mission to provide local outreach education on natural resources and land use planning, agreed to provide assistance on the natural resources and land use elements of the comprehensive plans. CLUE provided services in addition to the consultant�s contract. These services were intended to add value to the local planning process and provide a means to research innovative tools and methods for planning and participation in rural places. The remainder of this article will examine our efforts to help local citizens and committee members map environmental corridors and development constraints.

Educational Program

To map environmental corridors and development constraints, CLUE sponsored two three-hour Strategic Mapping Workshops held on two separate weekends. A small group of dedicated citizens participated. They were selected from each municipality for their involvement as plan committee members or as interested citizens. The primary goal of the workshops was to help this group identify and map natural, cultural, and regulatory features that would guide land and resource management over the next 20 years. The purpose of the workshops was not only to build useful maps for planning, but also to:

1. Provide an objective method to help map resource areas for policy development

2. Open a dialogue to facilitate understanding and consensus building

3. Build local leadership and capacity among local planning officials

Methods

Data collection
Prior to the workshops, the CLUE team collected GIS map data from the consultant and from various state and local sources. Data included an array of ESRI shapefiles to portray natural resources such as surface water, wetlands, and slopes; existing land uses including residential, commercial, roads, etc.; regulatory data such as shoreland zoning buffers; and public ownership categories that also delineated tribal lands, not within the jurisdiction of the planning project. These data would help facilitators get to know Ashland County better as well as provide our citizen participants the information required to make place-based decisions.

Presentations
The participatory mapping workshop commenced with two educational presentations. The first presentation showcased how to identify and map important linear patterns, known as environmental corridors, which connect various natural resource features. The presentation also explained how the environmental corridor concept could be used to identify areas to:

1. Support recreation and tourism

2. Protect water quality

3. Enhance aesthetic experiences

4. Provide space for wildlife

5. Provide a means to guide future development

Image 1.  A citizen participant uses the GIS to articulate her reasons for
including a specific land feature in the environmental corridor map.

Citizen leadership skills and understanding
The mapping workshops helped develop new leadership skills and environmental understanding among participants. First, decisions were placed directly in the hands of participants. Second, a robust set of planning tools and information were provided to help them make these decisions. Equipped with the responsibility and the tools to accomplish a task, these citizens proved to be effective decision-makers.

As it turned out, the skills and human resources of our workshop participants were anything but lacking. Every participant was able to read and interpret the maps, understand complex patterns and relationships among map data, and understand the possible implications of attaching policy to map layers. The GIS tool, rather than presenting a challenge to these folks, was instead able to augment their skills. Participants had a new and increased set of information on which to base and make decisions (see Image 2).

At an upcoming planning meeting, these augmented skills would be tested. The county�s consultant presented an approach to quantifying existing land uses. One citizen who had previously participated in the CLUE workshops challenged that their approach would overestimate the amounts of land available for future development. Given access to new map information, this citizen was empowered to speak up and insist upon applying methods more representative of her community.

Increased credibility 
The GIS tools also enhanced the credibility of the facilitators and the resulting planning maps. For CLUE facilitators, the GIS tools enabled us to provide effective land use and natural resources education despite having little first-hand knowledge of Ashland County. The GIS helped to bring us up to speed about the location and extent of a variety of land-based features so we could talk about how to use these analyses to better represent the local area.

For participating citizens, the GIS tool provided an objective means to apply a set of community goals and objectives. For example, many communities state the protection of water quality as an important community goal. Science and research tells us that developed uses near water bodies can affect water quality. Community values and beliefs may also insist that protecting surface waters are important, but so is providing housing and business � these goals sometimes conflict. GIS provides a method to understand where these conflicts occur on the landscape, as well as a means to help citizens and committee members articulate visions and policy recommendations.

Accuracy and completeness of data 
The credibility of GIS for planning depends on the availability and accuracy of data. Data collected for the Ashland County project, namely roads and existing land uses, contained major flaws. Road data contained incorrect labels and sometimes entire roads were missing. Existing land use data often displayed incorrect uses or were missing attributes. We found that participants were very sharp map readers and easily identified these mistakes � even being so bold as to correct the errors at the workshop (see Image 3). Participants asked about these mistakes and many were concerned about the credibility of the resulting analyses. The first 30 minutes of both workshops were dedicated to helping the citizen participants understand the errors and convincing them that the workshops could proceed without significantly impacting the analyses. Accurate data would have further increased our credibility as facilitators and would have saved us valuable meeting time.

Allocating time to ensure data accuracy is essential for any planning effort. Although data collection was the role of the consultant, it would have benefited us as facilitators to play an integral role in ensuring the accuracy of the data. This challenge could have been transformed into an opportunity to involve citizens as responsible partners to verify the data for accuracy. This way, the community could have come to better understand and trust the data first hand.

Jargon 
Developing presentations concerning GIS and new planning concepts such as environmental corridors and development constraints posed a challenge of understanding new language. Although we spent time during the presentation to define technology and planning-related jargon, one participant strongly rejected the use of the phrase "development constraint" and our strong focus on environmental corridors. The CLUE team had spent some time considering the phrase "development constraint" for its simplicity. It was a term that to us was easy to understand. To this gentleman, however, the term, though easily interpreted, had a negative connotation towards growth. His philosophy was, "In this county we can protect the environment as well as provide for new development." The group spent about 10 minutes during the meeting to develop a term that everyone could agree to. "Land management factors," defined as "land features that should be considered when guiding future growth" ultimately replaced "development constraints."

Conclusion
Using GIS to enhance public involvement in planning can be a great tool for educators, but is not without it challenges. In Ashland County, CLUE had to wrestle with incomplete and inaccurate data, educate citizens and understand community concerns in a condensed timeframe, and help a group of citizens create planning products that will guide future decision-making. The GIS helped. The technology first provided us a means to learn about a community that we had little first hand knowledge about. Second, the GIS provided the citizen participants a tool to voice their concerns. The GIS paved the way for well-informed dialogue among participants at the workshops. Outside the workshops, these citizens were equipped with the knowledge set necessary to gauge whether planning products met their community goals, objectives, desires, or values. Learning GIS is not an insignificant task; yet, investing time to learn these skills provides natural resource and land use educators with an additional tool in their arsenal to conduct effective public involvement and planning.

References

Land Information and Computer Graphics Facility (LICGF) staff. 2000. Mapping

Growth Management Factors: A Practical Guide for Land Use Planning. Land Information Technical Bulletin, No. 2, 12 pp.

Miskowiak, Douglas. 2004. Spatial analysis quantifying extent of natural resources in Ashland County. [ArcMap 9.0]. Center for Land Use Education, University of Wisconsin � Stevens Point.

US Census. 2000. United States Census 2000 Summary File 3. Retrieved February 28, 2005, from www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2002/sumfile3.html.