Tuesday, August 4, 2020: 3:45 PM
Background/Question/Methods: It is often the goal of most planners and land management and conservation practitioners to be strategic and use the best data to help inform decisions in their community. This is often easier said than done, as there can be many challenges to using the best available data. Understanding and sorting thru the vast amounts of information that are often available can become overwhelming, and relevant data from research done throughout the community can often be difficult to access and interpret correctly.
In 2018, The Trust for Public Land worked with the City of Dallas to develop the Smart Growth for Dallas Decision Support Tool (https://web.tplgis.org/smart_growth_dallas/), a tool designed to help improve the environmental, social and economic resilience of Dallas by creating close-to-home parks, trails, and green spaces for the entire city.
This website and the planning tools that were developed provide a case study in how data can be identified and used to provide a community tool to help guide decision making to help mitigate the effects climate change will have on local flooding, urban heat islands and community health. The presentation will detail how individual community issues were identified, how data were used to identify priority areas uniquely important to the people of Dallas, and how that data was brought forward through the development of a web based decision support tool and story map to help guide parcel level decision making.
Results/Conclusions: The Smart Growth for Dallas Decision Support Tool provides a single, publicly accessible place to access these datasets and the results of the project’s priority landscape analyses. Since it’s release in 2019, over 250 people from across the city’s planning departments, local non-profits, academic community and the public have registered to use the tool and access the data available there to help guide their work.
In 2018, The Trust for Public Land worked with the City of Dallas to develop the Smart Growth for Dallas Decision Support Tool (https://web.tplgis.org/smart_growth_dallas/), a tool designed to help improve the environmental, social and economic resilience of Dallas by creating close-to-home parks, trails, and green spaces for the entire city.
This website and the planning tools that were developed provide a case study in how data can be identified and used to provide a community tool to help guide decision making to help mitigate the effects climate change will have on local flooding, urban heat islands and community health. The presentation will detail how individual community issues were identified, how data were used to identify priority areas uniquely important to the people of Dallas, and how that data was brought forward through the development of a web based decision support tool and story map to help guide parcel level decision making.
Results/Conclusions: The Smart Growth for Dallas Decision Support Tool provides a single, publicly accessible place to access these datasets and the results of the project’s priority landscape analyses. Since it’s release in 2019, over 250 people from across the city’s planning departments, local non-profits, academic community and the public have registered to use the tool and access the data available there to help guide their work.