Esri announced the publication of Green Infrastructure: Map and Plan the Natural World with GIS.
The book offers a road map for planning communities whose design stresses the importance of humans and a shared ecosystem equally.
“We need houses but often ‘grow’ them—instead of food—on our best agricultural soils. We need clean water but often cover the tops of recharge zones with roads and parking lots,” says one of the book’s authors, Karen Firehock.
Just as communities manage their built assets, such as roads or buildings, they must also manage natural assets. Green infrastructure planning uses maps, analysis, and legal tools for land development and conservation consistent with natural environmental patterns. Green Infrastructure: Map and Plan the Natural World with GIS lays out how to go about achieving that.
Readers follow a six-step process to identify, evaluate, and prioritize the areas deemed critical to preserving a healthy community. Equipped with this logical and iterative process, GIS modelers and analysts, land planners, landscape designers, ecologists, and other professionals can begin crafting accurate, data-driven maps that better facilitate local planning.
Green Infrastructure: Map and Plan the Natural World with GIS provides examples of how to use data to create custom maps to meet existing local needs. The book also includes methods readers can employ to create maps in areas that may not yet have a model.
Green Infrastructure: Map and Plan the Natural World with GIS is available in print (ISBN: 9781589484863, 282 pages, US$49.99) and as an e-book (ISBN: 9781589484924, US$49.99).
Both editions can be obtained from most online retailers worldwide.