Brad Stratton, The Nature Conservancy New York, with Kate Hubbs
This map shows the 55 year history of land protection by The Nature Conservancy(TNC) in New York, highlighting the extraordinary time and effort that went into protecting the roughly 700,000 acres of land that TNC has protected or helped to protect. Despite the countless hours of labor and millions of dollars, we have never had a map that shows the full extent of land conservation. This map is a milestone in the five year effort to create a comprehensive GIS database of all TNC land transactions. This effort required us to track down paper deeds and surveys from the last half-century in order to properly code the spatial data. There have been many complex land transactions that required a large team of GIS staff and database staff to create a comprehensive and easily updated Geodatabase. The end result was a map that cartographically shows all this work to TNC staff and supporters.
My intention in creating this map was to bring our large database to life and present the data in a way that engaged and captivated the viewer. My main challenge was representing individual parcels, some as small as one acre, on a map showing the entire state of New York. TNC has also protected parcels of land that cover thousands of acres. I didn’t want to overshadow the small deals because these parcels are still very important to tell the story of land protection; The accumulation of small parcels over time can show the effort it takes to create a viable nature preserve. I decided to generalize the land tracts into three categories to even out the size discrepancies. I symbolized them all as proportionally sized circles. The second challenge I had was displaying these circles in such a way that they didn’t all fall on top of each other when viewed at a small scale. Many of TNC’s preserves are conglomerations of dozens of small individual tracts, and showing them all at once would be impossible. To get around this issue I used cartographic representations in ArcGIS. These tools allowed me to elegantly display the many individual parcels in clusters around the primary “hotspot” of land conservation. The final map balances the size of individual parcels and the complexity of multi-parcel nature preserves. Another piece of information I wanted to convey was the various types of transactions TNC performs. I chose the four general categories of transactions and chose a qualitative color scheme to represent them. This information is especially important because it shows the many partnerships TNC has created.
Another important piece of information is the progression of land conservation over time both in cumulative acres conserved and number of individual transactions undertaken. Using the table summary tools in ArcGIS, I created a running tally of conservation over the entire time period and graphed that with counts of yearly transactions. This graph highlights both the acreage accumulation and the staff effort, regardless of transaction size.
This map has been viewed by primarily TNC staff. It has helped them recognize that knowing our conservation history is vital in knowing our present. This map helps us celebrate our organization in a way that a few numbers exported from a database could never do.