WHAT WE DO - Education - Open Space Preservation

To help New Jersey counties, municipalities and citizens identify their most important lands for preservation as open space, Passaic River Coalition has created a new map that shows the "water resource score" of all land in the Passaic River watershed. Places with the highest scores rank as the most significant for maintaining and enhancing water supply for the whole watershed region -- typically, wetlands, sloped land, lands with high capacity to absorb and store rainfall and snowmelt, lands surrounding streams, lakes and reservoirs, and lands with high ecological value.

The Water Resources Map was developed under a program funded by the State of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and administered by the Palisades Interstate Park Commission and the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission. 

The Water Resources Map was presented at the 2002 Annual Conference of the American Water Resources Association in Philadelphia and also to an audience of forty New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection staff members in Trenton, including then Commissioner Bradley Campbell.

                                                                               The Water Resources Map   

Municipalities and counties are encouraged to employ information from the map in order to help prioritize land with high water resource values for preservation. The methodology for creating water resource maps was adapted by Sussex County, NJ and the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission.

For more information concerning the Water Resources Map, contact out GIS Specialist of Passaic River Coalition. If you would like to learn more about the creation              

of the Map, read below.

    CREATING THE MAP

PRC combined these criteria into the Water Resource Map using GIS provided by the NJ DEP and other sources. All geographic data was converted into a uniform grid of 75-foot square grid cells - more than 500,000 such cells covering the entire Passaic River Watershed in NJ.

The values in each of the layers were then added together to produce a composite value for each cell in the grid. A detailed description of the environmental science basis and GIS implementation of the Water Resource Map is available from Passaic River Coalition.

                Table of maximum score for each category: