Metric Area 5.1 – UNC Asheville 2013-14
National Environmental Modeling & Analysis Center (NEMAC)
UNC Asheville’s NEMAC, established in November 2003, specializes in science communication, meeting facilitation, and the development of decision-support tools for local and regional planners, decision makers, and the public.
NEMAC helps people understand the relevance and importance of complex issues such as climate and weather, forest health, natural hazards, land use planning, and the wise use of our energy and water resources. NEMAC’s tools—developed with the assistance of UNC Asheville undergraduate research students—include web applications, interactive geographic information system (GIS) applications, multimedia delivery technologies, and print media. NEMAC and its many partnerships bring students, scientific professionals, and local decision makers together to help solve problems facing society.
NEMAC is self-funded and supports its applied research through mechanisms such as agreements, contracts, and grants with its various partners, including federal agencies, local entrepreneurs, and city, county, and state governments. Current partners include the City of Asheville, Buncombe County, the Land of Sky Regional Council of Governments, the Southwestern North Carolina Planning and Economic Development Commission, NOAA, the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites-North Carolina, and the USDA Forest Service.
Featured Projects
The WNC Vitality Index (www.wncvitalityindex.org) reports on over 160 metrics in the 27 counties of Western North Carolina through the perspectives of the region’s natural, social, built, and economic environments. Developed by UNC Asheville’s NEMAC in collaboration with the Mountain Resources Commission, the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, and the USDA Forest Service, the tool was designed to assist local governments, interest groups, and the public.
GroWNC (http://www.gro-wnc.org/), a Sustainable Communities Initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs, is a listening and planning process to develop regional and local strategies for economic competitiveness and job creation. Working in the five-county region of Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, and Transylvania counties, the GroWNC project team works with a consortium of local governments, non-profit organizations, and businesses to seek significant input from residents of the region, gather existing and historical data, and synthesize it to create a vision of the future with actionable results. UNC Asheville’s NEMAC worked with the Land of Sky Regional Council to facilitate community outreach, scenario planning for decision support, and mapping of results. Additionally, NEMAC worked with Land of Sky to design, develop, and launch the project’s online implementation toolkit and GIS-based map viewer.
Southwestern North Carolina Opportunity Initiative (Opt-In) (http://www.optinswnc.org) is an ambitious collaboration to better understand and inform the choices facing local governments, businesses, and families in Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Jackson, Macon, and Swain Counties, and in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian lands. It is a year-long effort to fill in research gaps, identify opportunities, and test alternative strategies to inform decision making about economic development, transportation planning, and the environmental factors. Opt-In is funded by the Federal Highway Administration, the North Carolina Department of Transportation, and the Appalachian Regional Commission, and UNC Asheville’s NEMAC provides geographic information system (GIS) support, visualization products, and other outreach and decision support materials, including the project’s GIS-based online interactive map viewer, posters, videos, and animations.