CUGIR

The Tompkins County Planning Department produced a land use and land cover data set of Tompkins County, NY in 1995 and in 2009 updated the data using the 2007 natural color ortho-imagery. Further updates were made in 2012. The need for this data set has been identified by various county departments, local municipal agencies, and other not-for-profit organizations. High resolution natural color digital orthoimagery acquired from the NYS Office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination (CSCIC), and a number of other secondary digital data sources (wetlands, hydrology, tax parcel and planimetric base data) were used to interpret and delineate land use and land cover directly on-screen. The land use and land cover classification system that was designed for the 1995 project to meet the needs of the users of these data was used for the 2007 data. In 1968, the Land Use and Natural Resource Inventory (LUNR) a state-wide land use and land cover mapping project, used aerial photographs to identify 130 land use and land cover classes. The Tompkins County land use and land cover classification system has been designed to be comparable with the LUNR classification system. Comparable classification systems will enable users to analyze changes in land use and land cover over the previous thirty year time period. Provides a county-wide data set of all land use and land cover classes in Tompkins County. Potential uses of these data include land use and land cover time change analysis, comprehensive planning and development suitability analysis.