Geographic Information System Support Hillsborough County Parks Master Plan
DES is assisting with development of a comprehensive Conservation and Environmental Lands Management Department Plan for Hillsborough County. The purpose of the 20-year plan is to establish a framework for decision-making regarding capital improvements, programs, management, staffing, and operations of its Conservation Parks, Preserves, and Trails. DES’ contributions to the project include providing inventory, mapping and analytical support services to Exum Associates.
DES will obtain park and conservation land polygons, GPS points, trail routes and other relevant layers as well as supporting data from the Florida Natural Areas Inventory and other sources. County layers will be compared to state level data to identify possible errors. Quality checks will be performed to identify duplicate records, attribute omissions, overlapping polygons and missing parks, with errors corrected and parks assigned unique ID numbers.
DES will produce indexed maps of park and trail locations across the county for an overview of the current and planned park network and analytical maps describing the number of people served by each park and the percentage of county park and conservation lands that overlap with areas identified through the Florida Ecological Greenways Network.
DES will perform GIS-based analyses to assist project decision makers. This includes determining the miles of trail within each park and identifying parks that are missing GPS amenity points as well as more complex queries such as determining the population served by a particular park and the breakdown of county park/conservation lands that are identified in multiple conservation programs.