Featured Stories: Volume 6 No. 2

• GIS at the University of Winsor  
  The City of Windsor is Canada's southernmost destination and has cultural and historical landmarks, groomed gardens and natural areas, gaming, international cuisine, and many events and festivals. The University of Windsor, located in downtown Windsor, strives to provide an atmosphere fostering creativity, discovery, application, critical thinking, service, and communication for faculty, students, and the community. The University supports excellence in research and creative activity in both emerging and established fields. The University of Windsor was established more than a century ago to meet the educational needs of Windsor and Essex County residents.
  
  
• Durham Region's Successful Enterprise GIS
  The Regional Municipality of Durham (Durham Region) is situated in the highly developed and populated economic centre of Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe. Durham Region lies immediately to the east of the City of Toronto within the Greater Toronto Area, encompasses an area of approximately 2,590 square kilometres, and has a population of over 530,000. Durham Region is comprised of a series of major lakeshore urban communities and a variety of small towns, villages, hamlets, and farms that lie immediately inland. The relatively flat lakeshore area marked by the bluffs, wooded creeks, and ancient shoreline, contrasts with the hummocky topography of the Oak Ridges Moraine running parallel to the shoreline only 25 kilometres to the north.
  
  
• La protection des régions naturelles du Canada
  Depuis les dix dernières années, le Fonds mondial pour la nature Canada (WWF-Canada) constitue la référence en matière d'analyse de carences pour la création d'aires protégées, tant en milieu terrestre que marin au Canada. Élément clé de la planification de la conservation, l'analyse de carences sert à concevoir et à mettre en place des aires de conservation visant à favoriser une gestion équilibrée du développement et de la conservation. En 1989, le WWF-Canada lançait sa campagne Espaces en danger afin de parachever des réseaux d'aires protégées dans toutes les régions naturelles du Canada. D'une durée de dix ans, ce programme a été couronné de succès, car il a contribué à la création de 40 millions d'hectares supplémentaires d'aires protégées au Canada et à l'établissement d'une base théorique et technique pour l'implantation d'une routine SIG automatisée permettant d'effectuer des analyses de carences à l'aide d'ArcView. Le système SIG s'avère dorénavant un outil indispensable pour les communautés, les promoteurs et les autres groupes qui souhaitent identifier et mettre en réserve des réseaux représentatifs d'aires protégées au Canada.
  
  
• Protecting Canada's Natural Regions   
  For the past decade, World Wildlife Fund-Canada (WWF-Canada) has been at the leading edge of gap analysis for the establishment of protected areas across Canada's lands and waters. Gap analysis is a key component of conservation planning, which involves the design and implementation of specific conservation areas to create a well-managed balance between development and conservation. WWF-Canada launched the Endangered Spaces Campaign (ESC) in 1989 as a ten-year advocacy effort to complete protected area networks in all natural regions of Canada. The ESC was successful in helping to create an additional 40 million hectares of protected areas across Canada and also in establishing the conceptual and technical basis for the implementation of an automated GIS routine to perform gap analysis using ArcView. GIS is now a critical tool that is helping communities, developers, and other groups identify and reserve a network of representative protected areas in Canada.
  
  
• La refonte de la géomatique forestière  
  En 2000, Abitibi-Consolidated acquiert Donohue et devient le plus grand producteur de papier journal au monde et le cinquième plus important producteur de bois d'ouvre en Amérique du Nord. L'entreprise devient également un important détenteur de contrats d'approvisionnement et d'aménagement forestier (CAAF) sur les terres publiques du Québec avec près de 28 % du total des attributions en résineux.
  
  
• Re-engineering Forest Geomatics
  In 2000, Abitibi-Consolidated acquired Donohue, thus becoming the largest newsprint producer worldwide and North America's fifth-largest lumber producer. At the same time, the company became a major holder of Timber Supply and Forest Management Agreements (TSFMAs) for government-owned lands in Québec, with close to 28 percent of the total allocation of softwood.
  
  
• ArcGIS Extensions  
  The ArcGIS suite of software is built on a common architecture that forms a complete GIS. This architecture supports a series of extensions that dramatically extend the functional capabilities of ArcGIS. The extensions can be used with any of the ArcGIS desktop products (ArcView, ArcEditor, and ArcInfo). Three new extensions were introduced at ArcGIS 8.3: ArcGIS Survey Analyst, ArcGIS Tracking Analyst, and ArcScan for ArcGIS. ArcGIS Survey Analyst allows users to manage survey data in a GIS database and represent survey measurements and observations on a map. ArcGIS Tracking Analyst provides capabilities for sophisticated visualization and analysis of time-related data. ArcScan for ArcGIS allows users to build vector databases using scanned raster imagery as input.
  
  
• Modules ArcGIS
  Élaborée sur une architecture commune formant un système SIG complet, la suite logicielle ArcGIS accepte une série de modules qui augmentent ses fonctions de façon remarquable. Ces modules peuvent être utilisés avec l'un ou l'autre des produits "Desktop" ArcGIS (ArcView, ArcEditor, et ArcInfo).Avec la version 8.3 d'ArcGIS, trois nouveaux modules ont été lancés: ArcGIS Survey Analyst ArcGIS Tracking Analyst, et ArcScan pour ArcGIS. Le module ArcGIS Survey Analyst permet aux utilisateurs de gérer les données topographiques d'une base de données SIG et de transposer sur une carte des observations et des mesures topographiques. Le module ArcGIS Tracking Analyst offre des fonctions avancées de visualisation et d'analyse de données temporelles. Le module ArcScan pour ArcGIS permet d'élaborer des bases de données vectorielles à partir d'images matricielles et numérisées.
  
  
• The Friends of Lavender Creek
  Archbishop Romero Catholic Secondary School (ARCSS) is located in Toronto's west end, near the intersection of Weston Road and Black Creek Drive. The school opened in 1989 and now has over 1,000 students. Historic maps of the neighbourhood surrounding the school demonstrate the existence of two major waterways, Black Creek and Lavender Creek. Black Creek, a tributary of the Humber River, is located just outside the main entrance to the school and is a prominent creek in the community. Students have been working on a longterm project to restore a smaller, secondary tributary of Black Creek, called Lavender Creek. The creek is located several hundred metres south of the high school. The students are using GIS to analyze and map various aspects of the creek including the flow and waste management.