Lab 1 ~ The PLSS

Introduction and background:
     For the first lab in this course, we undertook to understand legal description of a property, and use that to develop a legal description of the Eau Claire Confluence Project Propopsal, complete with several base maps displaying the project with overlays of different civil divisions for reference.  The goal here is to develop rudimentary digitizing and cartography skills while learning about different aspects of land parcels such as PLSS, Wisconsin's Township-Range system, and civil divisions.
     The City of Eau Claire, the Eau Claire Regional Arts Council, and University of Wisconsin -- Eau Claire have partnered with a number of private interests to finance an $80 Million development at the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers in the Old Downtown of Eau Claire, WI.  The project is to include student housing, an arts center, retail space and possibly more and it is hoped that the influx of funds to the area will revitalize a stagnant downtown.
    

Methods:
     The first step in the process of developing this lab was to digitize the proposed site of the project.
After setting up a geodatabase for the project, we loaded an aerial of the region (using the Bing basemap provided by ESRI) and a polygon feature class of parcel data provided by the city.  Next I created a new polygon feature class in my shiny new database for the porposed site.  I then found the parcels which are a part of the project using the identify tool and turned on snapping so i could begin digitizing.  While I could have simply selected the parcels needed and formed a new feature class from them, that is not the goal of this excersize.  Before long, I had two beautiful polygons where the proposed site stands (fig1).


fig 1 my digitization

     The next task was to develop six base maps with this data: one with a PLSS overlay, one using civil divisions, one using census tracts, one displaying parcel data (which was used in digitization), one showing city zoning, and a final map that pverlays voting districts around the site.  Fortunately for me, the geospatial data has all been provided by the city of Eau Claire, so I only need to develop the maps!  The six basemaps are added to one layout which includes scale bars and north arrows (like a professional, fig 3).  PLSS data does not exist within the city however, and the civil division map of the county would be entirely useless if focused on the confluence project, so these two data frames will act as locator maps to show the location of the project within the broader region (fig 2).



fig 2 My locators

 

fig 3 The Whole Shebang

     Finally, we had to develop legal descriptions of the parcels being mapped.  Using the parcel id's found with the identify tool, I looked up the legal information needed on Eau Claire's Property and Assessment Search.  This was put into a sheet containing a base map for each parcel and the important parcel information to provide a succinct legal description of the info (fig 4).  The result was a single file conatining both the legal description, of the property, the basemaps laid out as above, and of course this blog announcing  describing the processes used to develop these materials.


fig 4  My result