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Nicholas School Expands Partnership with The Nature Conservancy in Conservation-GIS

Pat Halpin teaching a GIS class in the Levine Science Research Center

Four years ago, when the Nicholas School’s Pat Halpin launched a professional short course on Advanced GIS for Conservation Site Design for members of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), he did not know that it would be the beginning of a partnership that would grow beyond the classroom and onto the Internet. But that’s what has happened.

If you climb the stairs to Halpin’s glass enclosed corner office on the third floor of the Levine Science Research Center, you’ll find the new TNC GIS office right across the hall. There the Nicholas School and TNC are actively working on two technology "incubator" projects to create Internet portals to GIS (Geographic Information Systems) data for environmental managers and researchers across the country. The Enterprise GIS program is designed to support conservation work on a national scale, and Mid-Atlantic GIS Data Library provides detailed support to conservation efforts in North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Mid-Atlantic GIS Data Library home page:
Http://madgis.tnc.org

Frank Biasi, TNC Enterprise GIS Manager, attended Halpin’s training course and later joined the Nicholas School full-time as a Ph.D. student. The Enterprise program, which Biasi now runs part-time from within the school, is designed to set up an Internet-based site to support GIS mapping and training, data sets and communications for the national organization. Christoph Spoerri (MEM 1997) recently joined Biasi to work as a GIS analyst and Web developer.

Chris Mankoff, manages and distributes data for the second Internet incubator project, the Mid-Atlantic GIS Data Library. This project involves the construction of a detailed conservation mapping database for the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is explicitly designed to facilitate the communication of high quality data between Nicholas School students and researchers and TNC partners in Field Offices and conservation sites. TNC’s Mid-Atlantic Division funded the project to foster use of GIS by their staff. The project also received a $50,000 donation for hardware and startup costs from the Educational Foundation of America facilitated by Bobbi Bohart (MEM 2000).

Halpin, assistant professor of the practice of landscape ecology, is excited about the Mid-Atlantic project because it creates a repository of data that benefits both TNC and Nicholas School students. "In the past, students have had to gather the data from many different sources, and once they have completed what are in some cases very good projects, the data disappears."

"This data library is the missing piece that gets written out when you do one project at a time. Here you have accurately maintained data sets and a repository for projects so that the data is actually used."

To help further the program, the Nicholas School sponsored the first Mid-Atlantic Conservation GIS User Workshop in January. Halpin’s summer course also is continuing, and he anticipates possible Web-based courses in the future.

For information on the TNC Enterprise program, check out the Web site at http://gis.tnc.org or contact Biasi at fbiasi@tnc.org. For information about the Mid-Atlantic GIS Data Library, check out Web site at http://madgis.tnc.org or contact Mankoff at cmankoff@duke.edu.