GIS and Remote Sensing

Biography

Biography: Shyla Liebscher

Abstract

The Houston Parks Board is a non-profit organization that is currently undertaking a major intiaitve called Bayou Greenways 2020 to build 80 miles of hike and bike trails and parkland along bayous throughout communities in Houston. These hike and bike trails are a valuable form of transportation for many in the underparked community, but they also provide tangible health benefits, socio-economic benefits and environmental benefits. While the organization was busy building these major infrastructure projects along Houston’s bayous, they discovered along the way that providing easy access within the organization itself and its public-facing website to locations and information about amenities of these trails and greenspaces was a necessity. Out of that necessity came the intiative to build a public mapping application. The Houston Parks Board has leveraged it’s nonprofit status to create a dynamic GIS database capable of hosting both internal and external data that ties directly back to a GIS server, which creates up-to-date information available for all uers at reduced cost, reduced speed and high integrity. Creating this public mapping application has and can continue to reduce maintenance efforts because if can inform the organization of repairs, provides a central repository for all projects, and maintains a seamless and streamlined data processes and transfers from multiple vendors. This model can be trasferred to other organizations and agencies, and the solutions provided by creating this dynamic system can do the following: • Gather real time information submitted by the actual users of the infrastructure; • Increase productivity and better time management due to less time monitoring out in the field; and • Creates a better defined experience for users because their input is taken into account.