GIS, Site Analysis & Mapping
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Project
Since the later 1990’s, IAGT has been effectively providing the primary geospatial capacity of the NYSDEC's Division of Water. The program has evolved over the years as IAGT has assisted the Division in building and maintaining internal capacity, and in formalizing some processes from pilot programs into full scale production programs. An example of this is the FEMA-supported digital floodplain mapping program. NYSDEC, with IAGT’s assistance, has been a national leader in promulgating digital mapping processes to support the floodplain mapping program and updating the State’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps (DFIRMs). Related to the DFIRM production process is the development of a storage and retrieval system for the volumes of digital data that are produced, from elevation data to survey cross sections, to engineering models. IAGT has helped design and implement a Flood Study Geodatabase (FSG) in collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin that is pioneering how flood study data is being stored and distributed to stakeholders.
In addition, IAGT has been effectively acting as the New York State Custodian for the USGS and EPA sponsored National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) program. The NHD represents not only the traditional "blue line" data one expects to find on maps and in GIS data holdings, but a fully linear referenced and dynamically segmented spatial index. This new functionality is introduced at a high resolution scale by conflating the NHD vector data to the NYS Digital Ortho Photography.