Douglas County, WI Workshop

 

On December 8th, 2017, Kevin Benck presented a training session workshop for Douglas County, WI staff on the use and application of a set of tools and data that will aid county staff in the identification and prioritization of wetland restoration sites/projects.

Over the last several years, GSS Analysts have been working with the Douglas County, WI Land and Conservation Department (LCD) to develop a site selection/prioritization protocol and the necessary tools and data as a component of a multi-criteria decision support system to support land management, proposed development, evaluation of wetland mitigation proposals and the creation of regional in-lieu fee mitigation (ILF) program.

GSS worked with the LCD to develop a site selection matrix protocol, the data required for this matrix, and the design of the geospatial tools to support decision-making. GSS developed geospatial datasets representing a functional assessment of current wetlands, locations of potentially restorable wetlands, and a variety of other hydrologic and land use datasets that were used to populate the site selection/prioritization matrix. Finally a set of tools were developed that allows County staff to interrogate the datasets that populate the matrix and generates data outputs that can be incorporated in the decision-making process for site selection, or to identify high priority locations for wetland restoration or preservation, or to create new matrix data for use in scenario planning or other what-if situations.