Planning Department Mapmaker Wins Award for GIS-Generated Map of Agricultural Reserve

SILVER SPRING, MD – The Montgomery County Planning Department won a prestigious academic award earlier this month for generating a wall-sized, intricately detailed color map of the county’s nationally known Agricultural Reserve. The map was deemed best in the “professional” category at Towson University’s recent Geographic Information Systems (GIS) conference, which draws scores of submissions and is attended by hundreds of mapping professionals and cartography students.

The 93,000-acre Ag Reserve, which runs along the county’s northern and western borders, protects farming in one of the nation’s best examples of agricultural protection so close to a metropolitan area.

Jay Mukherjee, a researcher and specialist in the use of GIS to produce planning maps, created the map to display in the Planning Board auditorium at its Silver Spring headquarters. The 5-feet- tall by 5-feet-wide map graphically depicts the Ag Reserve in an attractive, high-quality image.

Montgomery County has used GIS, a computer-based mapping technology that analyzes spatial data by location, for more than 15 years. The Planning Department’s Research and Technology Center routinely generates maps depicting planning-related geographic boundaries and areas.

Mukherjee’s map differs from traditional county map because of its detail – topographic features, labeling, graphics, and its sheer size. At a glance, one can see the significant acreage of the Ag Reserve in proportion to the rest of Montgomery County.

The award at Towson’s 2008 Map Design Competition, determined by conference participant votes, recognizes the Ag Reserve map as a marriage of good design and “visual display of cartographic data.” The map will be exhibited in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore until June 28.

More info:  http://www.mcparkandplanning.org/gis/

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