The development and application of a county-level geographic database

The purpose of this paper us to describe the collection of land use data by remote sensing techniques, the incorporation of land use, soils and slope data into a geographic database, and an application of geographic database techniques to a county planning problem. Land use data were successfully interpreted from aerial photographs and incorporated in a geographic database along with digital slope and soils data. All data were registered to a common map base and rasterized to 50- by 50-meter grid cells. Data combination procedures were applied to the database to produce an image depicting areas of relative suitability for dwelling unit construction. This image can be used for planning future urban development. However, the limitations of this suitability image, which have been introduced through data resolution, data combination techniques, and subjectively made decisions, must be considered by data users.