In the Forest County Land Conservation and Land Information Department, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used every day. I am sure you use GIS in your everyday life and you might not even know it. If you use Google maps to get directions or find a restaurant near you, you are using GIS. If you watch the weather forecast, you are looking at a product developed by GIS. GIS is a computer system that analyzes and displays geographically referenced information. It is capable of capturing, storing, manipulating, analyzing, and displaying data in two or three-dimensional maps. GIS connects data to a map, combining location data (where things are) with all types of descriptive information (what things are like there). This provides a base map that can then have more data added as “layers”. The most common layers used in this department are our aerial imagery, roads, address points, land parcels, and water. Although there are many more, these are essential for maintaining our parcel map data. All of these layers on a single interactive map, allows for spatial analysis. This spatial analysis can be applied to a range of fields like urban planning, conservation, agriculture, and emergency management. Forest County uses the GIS tool ArcGIS Pro, which is a software application. In ArcGIS Pro, I am able to add different layers on different base maps for different purposes. For example, if the Broadband Committee wants to know where the next fiber project should go in Forest County, I would take our layers such as buildings, roads, current internet services, census data, and address points and overlay them on each other. This would help the committee visualize where people live in the county and whether or not they need/have internet access. These layers do not create themselves, and that is where a lot of time and data management skills come into play when creating and editing this data for analysis applications.
For more information contact Kayla Littleton, Forest County Land Conservation and Land Information Director at 715-478-1387 or by e-mail at .