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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