Center Spread: Click for PDF version

City planners will soon begin analyzing a sophisticated inventory of Columbia’s natural resources that will have a multitude of uses, such as helping council members resolve disputes over development and decide where to build roads and utility lines.

Property owners, builders, environmentalists and anyone with a computer and access to the Internet will be able to examine the Natural Resources Inventory. The joint project between the city and the University of Missouri’s Geographic Resource Center used high-resolution aerial photography, with color-coded and infrared data layers and field verification.

Tree species, water, grass, impervious surface, land slope and other information will be compiled into one database. The applications are bountiful: vegetation analysis for storm water modeling, identifying climax forest for preservation, locating sunny spots appropriate for solar panels and locating ideal areas for park trails, to name a few.

City Manager Bill Watkins promoted the Natural Resources Inventory during a City Council work session on growth management planning last Monday.

John Fleck, the city’s geographic information system coordinator, gave one example of how the lack of data about Columbia’s natural resources causes problems.

A few years ago, a citizen-led group proposed a development moratorium on slopes greater than 25 percent, and Fleck started looking into where such slopes are located. It turned out there really weren’t many such slopes in the city. And the land that did have slopes above 25 percent wasn’t the land that the group was targeting when it proposed the moratorium.

Assistant City Manager Tony St. Romaine said having this baseline of natural resources data will allow policy makers to make informed decisions and refer to an established set of data on, for instance, development issues.

It gets people away from, ‘my data is better than your data,’ said Tim Haithcoat, program director for the university’s Geographic Resource Center and manager of the NRI project. You start getting to the root of the problem and allow people to compromise.

Not only will the data be a reference for development policy, Haithcoat said the city could add to it every few years in order to track changes in the city’s natural resources and evaluate the effectiveness of land-use ordinances.

But right now, Haithcoat and Wenbo Song, a research specialist in the Geographic Resource Center who’s been working on the project since the university got the photos, are just trying to finish editing the current inventory. They’re close. Haithcoat estimates it should be ready to hand over to the city in only a couple of months. But it’s tedious work.

Song has spent about eight hours a day for almost four months editing the maps. When the university finally got the photos, volunteers and city staff surveyed selected portions of the photographed area and came back with training data features of certain tree species that can be used to identify other trees of that species.

By plugging the data into a formula and looking at it with multi-spectral imaging, which uses only certain colors in the photo, it’s possible to identify similar features on other trees and identify not only all the trees in the photographs, but what species they are. The six-inch resolution per pixel allows an excellent view of the groundcover and a precise analysis of vegetation. Viewers will be able to zoom deep into the image without losing clarity.

We can identify, for instance, a silver maple (extending) over a house, Haithcoat said. Those are infamous for limbs breaking in ice.

But Song still has to check for errors. For instance, shadows sometimes show up as trees because they match certain specifications in the formula.

It’s a relatively new approach to split up forests by species. St. Romaine and Haithcoat said they know of no other municipality that has done an inventory to this extent. So far, Haithcoat said they have identified about 33 different tree species in the Columbia metropolitan area.

But they’re still combing over the photos, tile by tile, to make sure it’s as clean as possible. Their main analysis, which focuses on ground cover farmland, water, tree species, grass, impervious surfaces and barren land will be overlaid with other data sets already digitally available, such as soil composition and watersheds, making the NRI a one-stop shop for geographic analysis.

We’re going to try to package as much as we can, Haithcoat said. Streams elevation there’s a lot of data sets we hope to combine. I’m anxious for the city to start using it.

Fleck will be using the basic land cover analysis submitted to him to calculate things like the city’s total percent of impervious surfaces, tree cover and grass cover. The NRI will replace older data sources and also integrate things like a floodplain map, which has already been established.

Fleck said the NRI’s availability to the public will help developers comply with city ordinances and citizen groups identify resources they want to protect. The site will be set up like the Boone County Assessor’s site, allowing people to search for individual properties using a county land parcel number or an address.

What people are really looking for is individual property resources, Fleck said. We’ll be able to do policy analysis look and see real property impacts.

For instance, it could be used for a land preservation strategy based on slope, he said. Or the Water and Light Department could use it to identify trees with fast growth and establish a tree-trimming schedule to protect power lines. And developers could get an idea about trees in a particular area before they decide to buy the land, Fleck said. St. Romaine said that the Planning and Development Department, the Parks and Recreation Department, the Public Works Department and the Water and Light Department would be able to use the NRI for various projects.

Planning and Development Director Tim Teddy said the NRI will allow his department to come up with comments when reviewing proposed building projects more quickly. He cited a city tree ordinance to preserve climax forest. That usually requires field work, he said. Now, the reviewers could look at the tree species in an area right in the office.

At a project level it will allow us to call on the NRI to get a more accurate description of the land, he said. As an in-house resource, we’ll be able to provide more accurate review comments.

Mike Hood, Parks and Recreation director, said the NRI could be used by the department to identify which parkland should be preserved and which land would be a good place for sports fields and playgrounds. It could also be used to identify new potential park areas and what resources are already located within the city’s parks.

The more info you have, the better decisions you can make, he said.

Water and Light spokeswoman Connie Kacprowicz said her department has been anticipating the NRI for a while. Water and Light could analyze how successful the department’s Tree Power program has been and identify areas where it could concentrate on advancing the program. She also said the department has discussed using the NRI to find areas with little shade for solar panels or analyze building square footage. And using the map with a city power line overlay could help the department manage vegetation near power lines.

Third Ward Councilman Karl Skala wants the NRI to be used for growth management planning.

I hope it is an important contribution to planning what we have developed, what we haven’t and what might be ripe for preservation. Skala said.

The NRI, he added, could be a valuable resource for the development community, as well. It could be a win, win by finding ideal places to extend and develop city infrastructure, he said.

The city first brought up the idea of a natural resource inventory during the city council’s 2005 retreat. The city hired The Surdex Corp., of St. Louis, which in June 2007 started taking the aerial photos of 198 square miles around Columbia.

Sixth Ward Councilwoman Barbara Hoppe was one of the first proponents of the project. She is pleased with the results so far, and like Skala, hopes it can be used for growth management planning. By protecting and enhancing Columbia’s natural resources, Hoppe said the community will benefit economically by attracting good businesses and also recreationally by sustaining outdoor opportunities for residents. The project can also help maintain good water quality and help keep Columbia a sustainable community, she said.

As we grow, we want to make sure we continue to have natural resources that make this an attractive community that people want to live in, she said. We have to make some decisions about where to build and where not to build.

Columbia’s Natural Resources Inventory

n 1821, the pioneers who purchased 2,000 acres and established the village of Smithton realized they settled in the wrong place. They lacked water, so they moved about a mile southeast to the plateau between the Flat Branch and Hinkson creeks and renamed their town Columbia.
The oak, elm and hickory oak forests that dominated Boone County’s landscape were cleared by farmers.
^TMKentuckians and Tenneseeans moved out here, and when they did, they brought their axes with them,? said Jim Harlan, a University of Missouri Geography Department researcher who compiled data on what the natural resources in the state looked like at the beginning of the 19th century.
For effective conservation, it’s important to know not only what resources and landscape exist now, but what used to be there, Harlan said.
^TMYou have to understand what you have now so you know where to go to work,? he said. ^TMYou have to have an image of the past when you say you’re going to restore land. Well, restore it to what? You have to have a historical reference condition.?
While current landowners have a wealth of geographic data that would have prevented the mistake made by the Smithton residents, city planners say the current data is still limited.
That will change early next year when the city and MU have completed the Natural Resources Inventory, or NRI.

What can NRI be used for?

• The NRI provides data that will help with many different implementation issues. These include land preservation, planning and managing growth, stormwater management, energy efficiency, historic preservation, and economic development.

What is the NRI?

• The NRI is a compilation of data, descriptions, and maps to document the natural resources in the Columbia Metro area
• The NRI is intended to provide an information baseline on vegetation, tree cover, and land cover
• Continued observations, data and research outcomes will be added to the NRI to update data and to capture additional data as it becomes available

What the NRI includes:

• Land cover: natural landscape recorded as surface components: forest, water, wetlands, urban, etc
• Geology
• Energy: fossil fuel, wind, solar,  geothermal, biomass
• Physiography & Relief
• Watersheds: land cover and tree canopy, soils
• Streams: classifications
• Water pollution: types and sources
• Tree Canopy: coverage and composition
• Habitat: Types and spatial characteristics
• Cultural Resources: archeological survey areas, sites

Developing the NRI

• It was determined that the mapping of vegetation and land cover would best be developed from the analysis of high resolution multispectral aerial photography and field checking and/or uses other geo-reference data layers
• The aerial photography was acquired digitally and incorporated into a geographic information system (GIS) using State Plane coordinates
• The vegetation and land cover analysis would be done by the personnel at the University of Missouri’s Geographic Resource Center and trained natural resource professionals familiar with the particular Central Missouri plant species to be inventoried
• Community stakeholder groups and data stakeholders would meet to define the data products to be produced from the imagery

The NRI Study Area

• High resolution color imagery (6″ pixel) was acquired for the 180 square miles within the Columbia Metro Area and an additional 18 square miles outside the Metro Area along the southwest
• City of Columbia: 61 square miles
• Columbia Metro Area: 180 square miles

Ground Verification

• Ground truthing is the act of physically surveying the land cover on a selected site
• The application of information collected during the ground truthing process produces the data relationships between the pixel values on the digital imagery and actual ground cover.
• Over 1,250 individual locations were surveyed by local volunteers and City staff, covering approximately 15 square miles

NRI Content & Applications
The products from the imagery analysis will be incorporated with existing GIS resources to create the Natural Resource Inventory databases and accompanying document.  The NRI may be used to perform various analyses based upon direction by Council, such as:

• Natural resource assessment
• Vegetation & tree canopy mapping
• Land use & development policy analyses
• Planning for roadways, green space, trails, & parks
• Energy conservation
• Storm water management
• Tree preservation
• Land preservation