Cape Cod Impervious Surfaces

Cape Cod Impervious Surfaces
Impervious Surfaces of Cape Cod (277k .gif)

The Cape Cod Impervious Surfaces map was created by aggregating high resolution spatial data from local town governments, federal agencies, private corporations, and NGOs. We requested from all 15 towns on Cape Cod spatial data depicting the location of impermeable surfaces in their towns. The towns of Falmouth, Chatham and Barnstable provided the highest quality data. Smaller communities, such as Truro and Harwich, were unable to provide any data.  Other towns provided only partial data. We acquired data from the Cape Cod National Seashore and from the Massachusetts Military Reservation, the two largest landholders on Cape Cod. Furthermore, we were fortunate to have a commercial data set of the road networks of Cape Cod donated to us by the Geographic Data Technology Co. of Lyme, NH.  At the time of this report, seven of the fifteen towns on the Cape have large-scale GIS data sets that they were able to share. Other towns either plan to do without such resources, plan to develop GIS datasets in the near future, or rely on the far more generalized data available from the Cape Cod Commission. The shared datasets ranged in quality from a random collection of ungeoreferenced and mis-managed files to a complex and well maintained geodataset.