2016 Washington GIS

Washingtonians are known for their love of the great outdoors, yet few appreciate just how many recreation resources exist in our state. Recreation information tends to be produced and presented by agency, but recreation users are more interested in location and facilities when picking a destination. In this talk, Washington Hometown will explore the power of good data to promote tourism and recreation and help people to share and understand what makes our state special. Through its Washington Hometown project, Manastash Mapping is building a consolidated database of recreation and culture with data on more than 10,000 publically accessible recreation areas and facilities managed by federal, state, county, city, non-profit and private organizations. Our data is mined from many public sources and developed in consultation with community groups. As each new data set is imported, the places are compared to existing data (to avoid duplicates), categorized (so that we can talk about resources by type across agency lines), and then researched to verify that they still exist and to add attribute data. In this talk we will explore recreation opportunities and gaps in Washington State, looking at the data across agency lines. Topics will include what areas (cities or counties) have the best and most limited access to public recreation; trends in the type of recreation in different areas (federal versus state, or land managed for multi-use versus land managed for recreation); and access to different recreation resources (camping or hiking) or experiences (luxury camping versus camping areas that cannot be reached by road). Finally, we will show how this single data set can be used to support a wide range of uses from tourism and economic development to search and rescue and land management.