In metropolitan regions, park and open space needs are critical factors in their residents’ quality of life. But many urban areas are split into smaller jurisdictions, and coordination and cooperation can be difficult. 

The San Francisco region’s Bay Area Open Space Council (BAOSC) has developed a unique partnership among public and non-profit open space groups in the nine county area. Now with over 50 member agencies, the Council has built a regional funding, education and coordination strategy over the ten years of its existence.

It was GIS that helped them get started and that has anchored many of their program accomplishments. Beginning with an attempt to inventory the public parks of the 7,500 square mile Bay Area in the 1980s, GIS provided through GreenInfo Network helped create a picture of the region, showing the extent and interrelationships between the holdings of scores of counties, cities, and state, regional and federal agencies, as well as non-profit land trusts. With a recently improved database and regional survey of 150 agencies (see sample sheets bottom right), this simple picture has grown into a compelling and accurate map of the area, now distributed as a large, GIS-based poster (upper right) held by most agencies in the region.

Using the inventories and database of holdings, the Council members began developing a “Vision” map (lower right), showing in general terms where future park and protected open space needs and opportunities lay. This GIS-based mapping helped them convince the state Legislature to create a special conservancy for the region, which in turn has enabled it to receive over $125 million in funding for open space protection in the nine county area.  

 The Council continues to use GIS for both maintaining the database of holdings and for special projects, including a key landscape analysis (lower right); a widely-distributed map showing how to use transit to get to regional open space areas (bottom); a web site that allows residents and others to quickly investigate park opportunities; a database of camping sites (bottom) in the region; and special multi-agency studies of large landscapes.