| Symbiont’s GIS Coordinator, Ryan Eckdale-Dudley, GISP, was invited to speak about the development of a custom GIS application for Elkhart County, Indiana at the 2008 National Brownfields. Ryan, along with the Community Development Coordinator and the Environmental Health Supervisor for Elkhart County government, was invited by the Brownfields Coordinator of EPA Region 5 to sit on the panel and discuss his work in developing the e-Atlas tool for Elkhart County. The application utilized the county’s existing Groundwater Protection Program and EPA funding to organize data into a Brownfields inventory. Each of the 5000 recorded sites were mapped, and over 200,000 pages of inspection records were scanned. As part of the project Symbiont developed a web-based GIS application that allows the county to view and query information using a map interface, called e-Atlas. The GIS application provides Elkhart County with the ability to efficiently maintain a long-term potential brownfield inventory, prioritize potential brownfields sites for funding and redevelopment, and access environmental datasets not easily accessible in the past. In September of 2008, Ryan was asked to give the presentation in a webinar format as a CLU-IN session. The presentation can be found at http://www.clu-in.org/conf/tio/r5bfelkhart_091008/. |