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Open Lands Conflict Negotiation

One avenue currently being explored by the Spatial Data and Visualization Center, in cooperation with Western Lands Legacy, a non-profit organization, is the use of legally binding private land use plans. This type of planning allows for all landowners within an area of mutual interest to equally be involved in the negotiating and development process by addressing and incorporating the needs and concerns of the collective group into their plan.

Primary Objective:

To accomplish this objective, decision-support research is focusing on designing a GIS database and an accompanying interface that can be used by individual landowners and facilitators through- out all phases of this private planning process.

Project efforts are being focused on two watersheds located in the northern portion of Johnson County and southern portion of Sheridan County, Wyoming; Crazy Woman Creek and Clear Creek. By using these two watersheds as "pilot regions", it is anticipated that developed methodologies can be replicated in other areas throughout the state.

Through a needs assessment and a brainstorming session with landowners and WOL personnel, nine major GIS themes were selected to be created for the regions in order to implement the land use planning tool, including: hydrology, roads, public land survey, land ownership, aerial photos, state land leases, home sites and hotlinks (digital landscape photographs).

The ArcView interface is being developed for two related tasks: The first application will give individual landowners the ability to incorporate their needs and concerns within the database without having to be well versed in the methodologies of GIS. Usually these preferences can be translated into spatial regions which they plan to develop and/or wish to protect.

Once all the landowners of the collective group have placed their development/protection scenarios within the GIS, then the second application can be used. It will overlay all of the individual preferences and display regions where collaboration is needed for a group consensus to be reached. The facilitator can then use this information to aid in negotiations among conflicting parties. If and when a comprise is reached, the changes will be placed directly within the database. After the planning process is finished, the land use scenario can be mapped and made available to all landowners before incorporating it within the legally binding private land use plan.

The digital aerial photos registered for the 17 quadrangles covering the pilot project area are available for download through the WyGISC's Wyoming Natural Resources Data Clearinghouse.