The first meeting offered a comprehensive look at Dane County land use presented by Ventura, URPL Professor Ben Niemann and Phil Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture. They used more than 30 digitally produced maps to give a panoramic view of how cultural, economic and environmental factors are shaping current land use. Using advanced mapping techniques and publicly available data, Niemann concluded that up to half of the county's developable land is already gone. That contrasts with estimates from the Dane County Regional Planning Commission, which suggest that only 15 percent of Dane County land has been developed. The web page assembles the user's choices and applies them, color-coded, to a map of Verona Township.
Users can zoom in to see individual houses and trees.
The Verona project is a prototype of the technologies that Dane County and other counties may adopt. It was also an education for Ventura and his colleagues. In Verona, we showed the effects of a quarry and golf course. We consider visualization to be one component of the information to be delivered. We found that the visual changes associated with development are extremely important to people.