Coastal Services Center

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Project Process and Technical Steps

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Introduction | Work with State Partners | Choosing a Project Location | Fleshing Out Project Details | Visiting the Site and Collecting Data | Developing Alternative Site Design Scenarios | Developing Indicators | Reviewing and Revisions | Finalizing Scenarios and Indicators | 3-D Scenes | The Final Product

Introduction

What is the cost of development? How do you quantify the economic, environmental, and social impacts of a development? Coastal organizations have indicated that educational tools are needed to help communities address these questions and make decisions about growth and development along the coast. Since most growth and land planning decisions are made at the local level, the NOAA Coastal Services Center works to provide tools, information, and technology to coastal resource managers positioned to help address local-level decision making.

Project Conceptual Work with State Partners

In Georgia, as in many areas, coastal resource managers are grappling with sprawl issues. In developing this project, the Center partnered with the Georgia Coastal Management Program, Georgia Conservancy, and the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. All three organizations provide planning-related educational and technical assistance to local communities, and each articulated a need for geographic information system (GIS)-based educational materials to help their constituent groups visualize and make informed choices about development alternatives. (Visit the Project Partners to learn more about these organizations and how they plan to use the results of this project.)

Choosing a Project Location

In choosing a project location, the Center relied on the state-level partner to select a representative study site. Through the Georgia Coastal Program, a partnership was forged with the City of St. Marys, which provided local data and an actual project site currently under development in the area. From the outset of the project, it was agreed that this project would not be portraying, endorsing, or grading any actual development on the site. Nor would there be any obligation by the town or developer to implement any project results.

Fleshing Out Project Details

The team conducted an audience analysis to better define project end products and to make sure that partners' needs were met. An audience analysis is an exercise used to identify potential end users and how they might use and benefit from project products. Partner input to the audience analysis helped to ensure that our end products would be tailored to meet the needs of the coastal resource managers and others working to address coastal growth issues. Secondary audiences identified included students, interested citizens, and educators.

The audience analysis was set up in the form of a series of questions for all of the project partners to fill out and discuss. The questions were organized as a step-by-step process to help identify primary and secondary audiences for the project. View an example of the audience analysis used (PDF requires Adobe Reader). Please note that you need to tailor this example to suit the needs of your project.

Visiting the Site and Collecting Data

Center staff and project partners met in St. Marys, Georgia, in 2003 to tour the green site and to meet town officials and the development project manager. During the site visit, the project team was able to discuss data collection methods, explore the opportunities and constraints of the site, and forge stronger partnerships through face-to-face communication.

Developing Alternative Site Design Scenarios

A workshop was held in February 2003 to develop hypothetical scenarios that would be based on real development trends in the country. The project team decided to limit the site designs to three scenarios in order to simplify the analysis and ensure that the quantitative and qualitative results would be meaningful. One project goal was to achieve results showing variation in how different site designs can impact the environment, economy, and the community. A final decision was made to base the scenarios on conventional, conservation, and new urbanist development, none of which represent the actual design under development at the project study site.

Workshop participants included the Center project team, project partners, and several additional contributors with land use and planning expertise. Participants broke into three groups to develop the site designs, with at least one experienced land planner in each team. The designs were initially conceptual to make sure that each group included some principles of smart growth, and to ensure that comparison of the three designs would result in meaningful differences among the scenarios. Each group further refined its scenario by drawing lot lines and adding any missing features that would typify the associated development trend. Each group also developed a list of features highlighting key aspects of their design. These features were used in selecting the final suite of indicators to be measured.

At this point in the project, the aim was to have all three scenarios result in the same number of dwelling units, so an equal comparison could be conducted across all scenarios. This became a challenge during site design, so it was decided that the number of dwelling units need not be equal, but close. This is a recognized limitation of the scenario designs, in that it does not allow us to compare equally in terms of how many people each scenario could house.

After the workshop, the Center relied on the help of the project partners and ancillary reviewers to evaluate the site designs and provide suggestion for tweaking, as necessary, to help ensure the designs were realistic. Once complete, the hard-copy site designs were converted into digital format for use in a GIS.

Developing Indicators

The team began with a laundry list of potential indicators that was gradually culled through the scenario and data development process. The final indicators measured were chosen for their relevance to all three scenarios, their ability to highlight the quantitative differences among the scenarios, and the availability of required inputs (including level of detail of the scenario designs). As the project moved forward, the project team continued to discuss and refine the indicators selected to analyze project results. If it was determined that an indicator added no value to the project, it was dropped. For example, the team originally wanted to consider the relationship of the proposed scenarios to schools to help measure walkability safety for children in the scenarios. The scenario teams decided not to include schools in their designs because the site-specific need for a school in this area was not considered necessary and because no demographic analysis of planned or existing households in the area was to be conducted. As a result, this indicator was dropped from the analysis. Visit the Compare Indicators page to view the final indicators selected to compare the three scenarios. The team recognizes that there are many other important measures of comparison that were considered outside of the scope or feasibility of this project.

Reviewing and Revisions

Project partners had several opportunities to provide feedback and suggest changes to the scenarios via e-mail and at a June 2003 project meeting held at the NOAA Coastal Services Center. At the meeting, draft digital versions of each scenario were printed on large format maps and displayed for comparison. Preliminary results for the project indicators (percent open space, total number and type of housing units, etc.) were also presented. At this meeting, additional details for the 3-D scenes (such as setback width, sidewalk and trail designation, canopy cover, etc.) were documented for each of the scenarios by the groups that created them, in order to capture the design intent of each group. Such site design-level details were considered conceptually and only for the purposes of developing the 3-D scenes.

Finalizing Scenarios and Indicators

Once the scenario designs were finalized by each of the subgroups, the projects indicators were calculated, producing results for each scenario (indicator table). As stated under Developing Indicators above, the project indicators were evaluated using either the CommunityViz or SG Water Application. To view the three scenarios, visit The Scenarios section of the Web site.

3-D Scenes

Once the scenarios were in digital format and final indicators selected, technical staff used Visual Nature Studio to develop a selection of 3-D views for each scenario. These 3-D scenes help to illustrate the look and feel intended for each design and to highlight differences among scenarios. The Center primarily used Visual Nature Studio software to create 3-D scenes and fly-thrus of the three scenarios. Visual Nature Studio is a software package that allows users to create photorealistic terrain models, visualizations, and animations that simulate moving through three-dimensional space. The 3-D images and animations presented on this Web site were generated with Visual Nature Studio. A broad array of GIS data were imported and used to accurately place objects and ecosystems within the landscape. The CommunityViz application also has a spatially referenced 3-D modeling component called SiteBuilder 3-D, which was not exploited for this project.

The Final Product

Project results are shown on this Web site and intended for use in several ways. First, the site aims to provide an example of how alternative coastal developments can impact environmental, economic, and social factors. Second, maps and 3-D graphics are intended to help users visualize how alternative design components might look. The Web site has been structured to allow the user to walk through the project processes and to provide users with access to project inputs (indicator variables and formulas), as well as the results from the calculations. Our project partners will use the site as an educational tool to provide information and promote dialog with local government officials, planners, developers, and citizens in the communities they serve.

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