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2005 Progress Report: Land Use Sustainability Index for Puerto Rico
EPA Grant Number: X3832209Title: Land Use Sustainability Index for Puerto Rico
Investigators: Juncos-Gautier, Marìa , Gonzalez-Toro, Antonio C.
Current Investigators: Juncos-Gautier, Marìa
Institution: Universidad Metropolitana
EPA Project Officer: Bauer, Diana
Project Period: May 1, 2005 through April 30, 2008
Project Period Covered by this Report: May 1, 2005 through April 30, 2006
Project Amount: $287,400
RFA: Collaborative Science & Technology Network for Sustainability (2004)
Research Category: Pollution Prevention/Sustainable Development
Description:
Objective:The objective of this research project is to develop a geographic information system (GIS) base framework to establish a benchmark and measure the impact of land use trends of urban growth projects on the quality and availability of land, ecosystems, and water on the island of Puerto Rico. The expected result is the development of a GIS scientific model with a land use sustainability index.
Progress Summary:Science and Technology: Research Work
As established in the project proposal, four municipalities were chosen as case studies. These four municipalities are: Barceloneta, Carolina, Caguas, and Ponce. All four municipalities represent different island landscapes and regions to measure changes in land use. Carolina is a northeastern coastal town that has changed dynamically during the last 25 years, and it has suffered from urban sprawl. Caguas is a central mountainous township that also has suffered a lot of urban sprawl and has experienced dramatic land use changes in the last 25 years. Ponce is a south-central coastal town; it is not as sprawling as the previous two towns and has changed less proportionately than the other two. Barceloneta is a small town in the north-central coastal region of Puerto Rico. It also has changed much in the last 25 years because of industrialization and sprawl. With the exception of Barceloneta, the municipalities were selected because they have well established GIS/planning departments, have already developed municipal land use plans, and can provide historical data. The mayor of Barceloneta has an excellent relationship with the university because of other research and development initiatives, and he was eager to collaborate with the Project Team.
The team started by developing a Sprawl Index Map. We gathered for the project all of the available land use digital data for the four municipalities for 1970 and 1980. There were plans to photo interpret and digitize 1990 and 2000 photos with the help of a technician at the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), but this process was interrupted before its completion. Ideally, the output of this part of the project would have been a detailed land use change analysis for the last four decades (1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000) that would have allowed projecting land use change in the future.
A second aspect of the project has to do with geographic sustainability variables or parameters. The co-principal investigator (PI) developed a series of GIS maps as prototypes to discuss with the Advisory Committee to use them as parameters for a Land Use Sustainability Index. For example, street density, highway distance, Euclidian distance to schools, and so forth. These were presented to the Advisory Committee during the April 2006 meeting but have not been discussed further. The idea was to present a group of these types of variables to develop a multicriteria evaluation or a multiobjective land allocation exercise using IDRISI or some other GIS software. The output of this part of the research project would be connected with the output of the previous phase to create different sustainability scenarios to discuss with the Advisory Committee.
The PI and co-PI went to Colorado Springs in March 2006 to attend a STELLA®/iThink modeling seminar. STELLA® is a dynamic modeling software package that primarily is designed as a visual tool (no programming) for nontechnical people to view and model different kinds of systems that are dynamic. The idea was to use it’s the dynamic modeling capabilities of STELLA® to model land use change, the sprawl index part of the project, in a nonspatial way but connecting the output of the GIS maps. The former PI had plans to use STELLA® as a tool for the production of land use projections into the future.
Outreach Work
The Advisory Committee was constituted. The seven agencies that signed an endorsement letter for the project, all with primary duties on land use in Puerto Rico, joined the Committee. These local and federal agencies are: (1) Puerto Rico Department of Agriculture; (2) U.S. Forest Service-International Institute of Tropical Forestry; (3) U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; (4) Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resources; (5) Puerto Rico Environmental Quality Board; (6) Puerto Rico Planning Board; and (7) Puerto Rico Land Use Planning Office. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) was not contacted for the first round of meetings because its office is in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and they must cover their travel expenses. TNC’s participation is going to be more valuable at a later phase when the project team is ready to discuss a preliminary Land Use Sustainability Model and can use TNC’s ecoregional planning tool.
Also, the project team agreed to have representatives of 11 other municipalities, in addition to the 4 already selected as case studies, for a total of 15, on the Advisory Committee to have a representative number of the 78 municipalities in Puerto Rico. The additional municipalities represent almost all the different types of municipalities on the island (as indexed by total population, population densities, geographical location, agricultural/rural versus urban land percentages, those with a land use plan, and those that do not have a plan, etc.). All these municipalities have a planning office or officer. Letters were sent to the mayors of these municipalities and they all agreed to participate on the Committee.
During Year 1 of the project, the team held two meetings with the Advisory Committee: the first one (October 2, 2005) was to present the aims, tasks, schedule, methodology, human resources, and so forth for the entire project, as well as to confirm their willingness to participate in the Advisory Committee. The second meeting (April 5, 2006) was a workshop on the applicability of sustainable indexes presented by two experts with experience in sustainability-related research projects and in municipal land use plans. The invited experts were Dr. José Alameda, professor of the Department of Economics of the University of Puerto Rico, who developed an experimental sustainable index for municipalities, and José J. Villamil, professor of the Graduate School of Planning of the University of Puerto Rico and the president of Estudios Técnicos, Inc., a local renowned planning and economics research firm. The PI provided a technical progress report and the co-PI presented a series of GIS maps that he is considering as prototypes for the analysis of geographic sustainability variables or parameters to develop the Land Use Sustainability Index.
In addition to the above outreach work, the Community Outreach Coordinator, together with the project team, has done a number of personal and telephone interviews with state, federal, and municipal officials about statistical and geographical information.
Preliminary Data Results
Most of the data available for Puerto Rico does not include Federal Geographic Data Committee type metadata. Therefore, of the 165 layers available for Puerto Rico, from the Puerto Rico Planning Board, few are useful. We have tried to use the U.S. Census Bureau Data for years 1990 and 2000 as Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing files and some locally developed data base map layers like roads, rivers, and topography that originally were developed as Digital Line Graph files by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). If the project team decides to use some of these layers, for example, to create raster index maps, the data must be further studied for quality control assurance before using it in the modeling process. An example is the Puerto Rico Planning Board’s Archivo Grafico. It contains a point (latitude-longitude) record of the location of all the land development projects on the island and their classification (approved or not approved). Interestingly, some of the land development projects are shown as if they were located in the ocean. Obviously, this technical error should be taken into consideration and, if possible, somehow fixed.
Future Activities:At the beginning of the new reporting period, meetings should be held with the project team, the Advisory Committee, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to discuss ways to develop a workable definition of sustainability that can be inserted within a land use framework using GIS. Because this is a groundbreaking project for Puerto Rico, the project team believes that the project should use the least amount of variables/parameters as possible to begin with for the index to be useful and operational for the local municipalities and other stakeholders. The Advisory Committee definitely should play a large role in this part of the project.
While a workable definition of sustainability is discussed and agreed upon with the Advisory Committee during the first months of the next reporting period, the project team should define the conceptual model. This also must be a priority. In addition, the project’s theoretical framework with its corresponding cited literature should be developed.
The new PI will have to develop a new timetable with recommended activities to achieve the project’s goals and objectives in 2 years and meet with the Advisory Committee at least once every 2 months. The project team recommends continuing the scheduled tasks that were already proposed in the original timetable, incorporating into Year 2 the tasks that were not completed during Year 1 of the project.
Supplemental Keywords:land, cumulative effects, integrated assessment, sustainable development, land use policy, environmental decision making, natural resources conservation, landscape ecology, environmental planning, urban sprawl, monitoring, urban and regional planning, GIS, land use model, sustainability assessment,
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Ecosystem Protection/Environmental Exposure & Risk, Scientific Discipline, RFA, Monitoring/Modeling, Ecology and Ecosystems, Environmental Monitoring, Urban and Regional Planning, urban planning, watershed, geo-spatial internet system, developmental stability, land management, water supply, ecosystem management model, conservation, GIS, ecological models, land use model
Progress and Final Reports:
Original Abstract
2006 Progress Report