NEW TOOLS FOR RURAL DECISION SUPPORT FROM DIGITAL ORTHOPHOTO QUADRANGLES

Over 80% of the local governments in the United States serve rural communities. The incremental, day to day decisions made in these municipalities and local agencies form much of the practical base of land and resource planning. If the quality of these local decisions can be improved, a concomitant increase in the overall national quality of land use planing is likely to follow. The goal of this proposed research is to bring proactive, predictive planning tools to rural communities. The decision told proposed here will be developed from the Digital Orthophoto Quadrangles, (DOQs) combining them in a geographic information system (GIS) with other available resources and processing them for input into turnkey decision support systems. The product of this study will be a set of prototype decision support modules. This project phase will concentrate on: Developing multi-use land use and land cover categories Automating capture of land use and land cover information from DOQs and other photographic sources. Integrating the derived land use information into a multi-objective, multi-criteria, GIS-based decision support system for non-technical users. Developing prototype modules for land planing, stormwater management and depiction of the time series.