Especially in New England, with an abundance of Revolutionary War and presidential historic sites, the Cape Cod National Seashore's spectacular wealth of natural features tends to overshadow its historical importance as a relatively modest archive of ordinary people's lives. Yet the landscapes of Cape Cod, like most landscapes in the United States, are both natural and cultural. In an environment intensely saturated by special interests, everyday decisions take on extra significance. All the perspectives listed above are involved in deciding where to put a well or a walkway, how to repair a dune fence, whether to plant trees along a harborside pier, how often to mow a field, how many parking spaces to provide, or how many fishing boats to lease. Most will agree that giving people access to authoritative information and local knowledge makes for more effective decisions.
Technical help can come from computerized information systems and databases with a geographic focus.
This is where GIS comes in. GIS can, in theory, capture and display all the complexity of the natural, built, and social fabric of the Outer Cape. In less time than it would take using other tools, a GIS can let people see the same landscape in alternate ways. Each interest group, agency, and level of government involved in the Cape Cod National Seashore could in theory contribute data to a single GIS system, and then from that system produce maps showing how other interests intersect with or affect their own. Until this year, decisionmakers for the Cape Cod National Seashore turned for guidance to a 1970 Master Plan, whose value in directing management policy and operations steadily diminished through the 1980s.