The Jordan River Commission coordinates planning for and educates stakeholders about the Jordan River. This 50-mile long river is a significant tributary to the Great Salt Lake and historically a life-sustaining corridor whose flood-plain is increasingly pressured by the tremendous urban growth in the Salt Lake Valley. In order to assist habitat conservation efforts, the Commission wanted to know what lands along the river corridor would be most valuable and least difficult or costly to preserve in their open state.

In this context the Commission’s interest was in legal and economic avenues or barriers to green-space conservation rather than biophysical parameters, and so in consultation with the Commission’s Director, I operationalized “openness” along three dimensions: public v. private ownership, existing protection via conservation easement, and municipal zoning.

Parcel data from three County Assessor’s offices formed the basic unit of analysis, with parcels classified as private or public based on ownership data in the Assessor’s databases. Easement status came from the National Conservation Easement database, and zoning came from municipal governments.

Conservation easement protection is a fairly straight-forward binary condition, ascertained simply via spatial overlay of parcel features with easement features in ArcGIS. Classifying zoning as either protective of open space or not is a more complex issue, requiring that geospatial zoning features (polygons) be gathered from the variety of municipalities in the three counties traversed by the Jordan River on the way to its outfall(s) into the Great Salt Lake. Codes for different municipal authorities were analyzed and each zoning code found within the study area reclassified as either protective of open space condition or not. Binary public v. private ownership status was determined from tax class and owner name, a string matching and frequency analysis that was complicated by the diversity of names of record for large institutional property owners.

For PDF map books of inventory outputs, click below for cuts of the data showing flood zones, wetlands classification, large (15+ acres) parcels that are high-priority targets for conservation efforts, overall classification, and water-related land use, in that order.

JROSI Mapbook v03_FZ.pdf – 12 MB
JROSI Mapbook v03_NWI.pdf – 10 MB
JROSI Mapbook v03_P15ac.pdf – 10 MB
JROSI Mapbook v03_PEZ.pdf – 39 MB
JROSI Mapbook v03_WRLU.pdf – 11 MB