ISIS Center develops first GIS for 4 Valley parks 

By Jason Thomas
Interdisciplinary Spatial Information Systems Center

The Interdisciplinary Spatial Information Systems (ISIS) Center at Fresno State is providing four San Joaquin Valley State Parks with their first taste of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology.

GIS is a computer mapping technology that allows information about infrastructure, natural resources and physical geography to be combined for visualization and analysis.

Four local State Parks including Allensworth State Historical Park , Tejon Ranch State Historical Park , Tule Elk State Reserve and Wassama Roundhouse State Historic Park did not have the manpower or expertise to jumpstart their own GIS program.

State budget cuts make it even harder to get the human resources to start new initiatives.

The local parks district contracted the ISIS (Interdisciplinary Spatial Information Systems) Center to fill in as their GIS department, collecting map layers from government agencies and creating new ones.

New map layers were created by digitally tracing high resolution aerial photographs and paper survey maps into GIS software.

Maps were created and printed out for each of the four parks showing buildings, trails, roads, points of historical interest and other features.

Maps were then provided to the parks to give them visual tools to help manage their landscape.

The final data products were delivered to parks staff in industry standard GIS format so they could be used in the future.

A recent consolidation of park districts has resulted in the four parks being served by a headquarters that has GIS-experienced staff, software and hardware to begin making their own maps and analyses with data provided by the ISIS Center .

Student participation played a major role in the parks GIS project. As with many ISIS Center GIS projects, Fresno State student-interns conducted data collection, data creation and map layout work under the supervision of ISIS Center staff.

Kara Hass was the primary student intern working on the parks project and she moved on from her internship to a full-time GIS position with a regional parks organization in the East Bay area.

GIS Analyst Jason Thomas oversaw the project for the ISIS Center .