Geospatial Mapping at Vassar

by Rebecca Odell (Geography ’20)

Village of Wappingers Falls Pavement Condition Index Map. Click to view full size.

As part of my internship at the Dutchess County Transportation Council (DCTC), my project was to map road quality data from past internships completed by students from Cornell University. When I first started, there was no process in place to map this data in ArcMap, and it needed to be changed in order to be compatible.

My main obstacles were that the data was not recorded in a way that was compatible with GIS, and that the roads in the Cornell data and the ArcMap data were not divided in the same way. I learned a lot about formatting data that was not made with ArcMap in mind. I also figured out how to link the divided streets in the Cornell data with sections of streets already mapped in ArcMap.

My experimentations led to a process which is now being used to finish making pavement quality maps for local governments. Maps have been completed for Beacon and Poughkeepsie, which have bigger populations and therefore more roads than most of the other municipalities. I also made maps for the Village of Fishkill, the Town of Fishkill, and Wappingers Falls. Maps allow for easy and intuitive visual comparison, which will enable local governments to make informed decisions about which road repairs to prioritize.

A natural resources inventory (NRI) is a document that catalogues the natural and cultural resources within a given locality (e.g., municipality, watershed, or region). NRIs are used by local leaders to make informed land use decisions. An effective NRI should also illustrate where conservation efforts and preservation can be directed, and indicate where more research or focus would be helpful in the specific locality’s unique context.

The Environmental Cooperative at the Vassar Barns has been working on a Natural Resource Inventory of the City of Poughkeepsie since the spring of 2017. At that time, Rachel Marklyn ‘17 began the process of gathering existing data pertaining to the City’s natural and cultural resources.

During the summer of 2017, Elise Chessman ’18 worked on writing the water resources chapter of the City’s NRI. Water resources are a very important topic to the City of Poughkeepsie, with the Fall Kill a focal yet under-utilized part of the City and the Hudson River a notable feature of Poughkeepsie’s past and present significance. These factors made water resources a great jumping off point to begin writing the NRI. Along with a descriptive chapter on the City’s water resources, six maps were created, including: floodplains and percent developed imperviousness, watersheds, water quality, culverts and aquatic passability, and wetlands and hydric soils.

The future of the project will include writing and mapping geologic features and topography, land use patterns, and the cultural, recreational, and historic resources of the City. Hudsonia Ltd. is performing assessments on habitats and biological communities for the City as well.

As an appendix that will be included in the City of Poughkeepsie’s NRI, India Futterman ‘19 wrote an Ash Tree Management Plan, focused on the Emerald Ash Borer, which you can read more about here.

This Project has been funded in part by a grant from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund through the Hudson River Estuary Program of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Areas north of the east – west arterial have lower median incomes than those in the island created by the arterial and south of the arterial.

In this post on Mid-Hudson Currents, the Benjamin Center (at SUNY New Paltz) Blog, Senior Research Associate, Joshua Simons, outlines the geographic and socioeconomic divides in the City of Poughkeepsie through a series of maps. “It is striking how the physical barriers of the highways conform so closely to how the city is divided racially, ethnically, and economically,” Simons writes, referring to the divisions between communities on different sides of Route 9 and the east-west (US-44/ NY-55) arterial.  Continue reading →