GIAC is collaborating with Gallatin County on their National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Community Demonstration Project initiated by Vice President Gore. This community-federal information partnership will support the acquisition of community based information capacity to guide development of comprehensive land use policy and decision making in Gallatin County. Our role is to describe the current state of, and changes in the last 30 years in Gallatin County. The County along with the GIAC wants to provide the community planners with a foundation on which to begin the process of formulating the Gallatin Plan. The conditions and changes will be described by four themes: physical environment, economy, land use, and infrastructure. We have produced a series of twelve maps to illustrate these themes:

Intelligent Transportation System: Greater Yellowstone Rural Corridor Project

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) use advanced technologies to solve short-term and long-term transportation problems. Staff members at the Geographic Information and Analysis Center are working with the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University to create visual models which may help identify problem areas on our highways. This particular project focuses on the Greater Yellowstone Rural ITS Priority Corridor, a nationally siginificant rural transportation corridor between Bozeman, Montana and Idaho Falls, Idaho. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) serve as a powerful tool for ITS planning and evaluation. GIS allows one to link attribute or descriptive information to known points on the ground. The Dynamic Segmentation data model offered in the ARC/INFO GIS software package provides an effective framework to model linear features such as road networks, and to map multiple themes of information along these networks. Using a georeferenced roads database and milepost logs supplied by the state Departments of Transportation, accident information is mapped to corresponding locations along the roads. Accident attribute data (e.g. cause, number of vehicles, weather, road conditions, etc.) can then be displayed, queried and analyzed to identify problematic areas or patterns in accident occurances along these mapped highways. As WTI so eloquently puts it, the general theme of the Corridor ITS planning, demonstration and deployment is "Making rural travel safe, dependable and convienent."

Crow Indian Reservation: Leased Parcel Location Mapping

More than 6000 competent lease parcel locations within the Crow Indian Reservation were mapped for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Boundaries of the parcels were described solely by Public Land Survey System legal descriptions. A program was written by Robert Snyder at GIAC that reads the legal descriptions and calculates coordinates relative to already known section boundary coordinates to determine the locations of the parcel boundaries.

GIS Analysis of Reclaimed and Undisturbed Areas: Colstrip, Montana

As part of a cooperative agreement with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), GIAC developed a series of analytic tools to aid the MDEQ Reclamation Division in establishing an automated methodology for evaluating the reclamation success of mined areas. One objective of the study was to develop a protocol for measuring the compliance of annual revegetation efforts with respect to an approved post-reclamation revegetation plan. The Big Sky Mine Area A, a site near Colstrip, Montana, served as the pilot study for development of this protocol.

In order to regulate the reclamation efforts of Montana's coal mining industry, MDEQ aims to develop reclamation criteria which are ecologically sound and yet practical in application. This requires a solid understanding of the relationships between vegetation communitites and the undisturbed (premined) landscape. Thus, a second objective of this study was to generate a series of frequency distribution graphs displaying the frequency of naturally occurring vegetation communities with respect to the terrain attributes which support them, such as slope, aspect, topsoil salvage depth and range type.

Hunting District Maps for Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks

A series of digital state-wide data layers was generated for the Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Park's 1994 big-game hunting district maps. Base layers consisting of cities, counties, highways, hydrography, indian reservations,National Forest land, parks, and wildlife refuges were built upon data obtained from the Natural Resource Information System (NRIS). Much of the NRIS data was originally obtained from 1:100K scale TIGER Line and/or USGS DLG data. Hunting district lines not coincident with existing base layer lines, as well as additional features, were digitized from 1:250,000 USGS quadrangles. Annotation and customized highway symbols were generated in ARC/INFO ArcPlot module. (Note: a map showing all of the available baselayers is not shown here due to the immense detail).

Redistricting of Administrative Boundaries

Staff at GIAC have worked closely with the Local Government Center (LGC) at MSU on various redistricting projects for counties within Montana. For example, in 1994 Big Horn School District 17H requested that the LGC at Montana State University analyze its single member school zones to remedy the dilution of Native American voting strength. With the application of GIS, LGC was able to work with GIAC to perform a reapportionment analysis based on 1990 Federal Census data. The results of this analysis was a revised system of County Commission districts and school zones which better reflect the ethnic distribution of the voting population and, in turn, assure resident Native Americans the opportunity to participate in County Commission elections free from vote dilution. A series of maps and accompanying census documentation were generated in compliance with the four court order criteria: 1)compactness of boundaries, 2)contiguity of districts, 3)equality of population in each district, and 4)avoidance of vote dilution of American Indian residents.