The Department of Environmental Health's GIS Program is an Agency GIS within the City and County of Denver, which handles all GIS data, application development, spatial analysis, and cartography related to environmental sciences and City environmental health issues.

The GIS Program has a long history of GIS application in the Environmental Quality Division of DEH. The program began in 1994 and one of its main focuses is to allow GIS access to all users regardless of their technical knowledge. To achieve this we create many custom tools and GUI interfaces to allow users to access environmental GIS data as well as related electronic documents, including scanned images of historic maps and documents that relate to specific sites of interest. These include sites undergoing environmental assessment and remediation. Using GIS has helped to radically cut costs and improve the efficiency of the audit process. Where it once took 2-6 weeks to conduct such an audit, it now takes a matter of just hours to complete a preliminary assessment.

The GIS Program assists all agencies within DEH with their GIS work, as well as other departments that are working on spatial projects with an environmental component. An example of a program-specific GIS includes “GIS Plays a Major Role Tracking Animals”, which is detailed below.

GIS Plays a Major Role Tracking Animals

Where are the rats, bats, prairie dogs, mosquitoes and raccoons in the City of Denver? The City and County of Denver’s Animal Control Division knows the answer to this question.

In 2000, the Environmental Quality Division’s GIS Program and the Animal Care & Control Division formed a partnership to see how GIS could help with the vector control work. EQ hired a consultant and implemented the creation of the ArcView GIS Vector Control Program for tracking rat and mosquito breeding sites, changes in prairie dog colonies, and locations of bats and raccoons picked up by animal control officers.

Before the GIS program was implemented, mosquito sites, such as detention ponds, mosquito pools, and river and ditch breeding areas, were typically found by driving around the city and looking for probable animal areas. When animals or breeding areas were found hand written cards for each animal site were documented.

With GIS, animal breeding areas can be pin-pointed prior to field surveying using GIS base map data to locate favorable breeding locations, which are then field verified. If an animal is picked up by control officers, its source is located on GIS base maps by geo-coding its pick up address, and pertinent data about each animal and site is entered into the GIS database.

Since 2000, the Animal Care & Control Division’s Vector Control Program has mapped the boundaries of prairie dog colonies in and around the City of Denver. Each April, the division uses the Environmental Quality Division’s Trimble GPS unit to collect accurate data on the extent of these colonies. Before the use of GIS at the Animal Care & Control Division, there were no reliable methods to track the changes in size of city prairie dog colonies or when they were eliminated. Utilizing GIS mapping and reporting capabilities, these data can now be used to understand the distribution and annual change of prairie dog colonies in the Metro Area. Information can easily be provided to officials in the case of local Plague outbreaks.

With new Arboviruses (arthropod-borne viruses), such as West Nile Encephalitis, showing up in the United States, and possibly moving into Colorado, the need to track these and other diseases will increase in the future. The use of GIS will most certainly play a role in accurately doing this.

The Animal Care & Control Division also uses GIS to map the type and location of all the pet care facilities in Denver. This information is invaluable when questions arise from the public about what facilities are available in their area of the City.

More DEH GIS Projects in the Works

GIS tools are being used and developed for a variety of projects that span many DEH programs. Projects include Brownfield mapping, Lowry site studies, facilities permitting, facility compliance inspections, HIV Resources, Healthy People 2010, and historical landfill monitoring.