ATLANTIC COUNTY WETLANDS INSTITUTE

JOHN DELANEY

STOCKTON UNIVERSITY
 BACKGROUND

Widespread support from government, business and

environmental interests has led to the decision to

establish a Wetlands Institute in Atlantic County, New

Jersey.

The goal of this institute is twofold: to allow researchers

a place to conduct studies on the ecology of the local

environment, and to provide a location designed to

attract tourists, local residents and nearby schools to the

site for their enjoyment and education

OBJECTIVE: FIND BEST LOCATION BASED ON:

• WETLANDS ENVIRONMENT
• ATTRACTIVE TO TOURISTS
• LOCAL ACCESSABILITY
• NEAR SCHOOLS
• ADJACENT TO ATLANTIC CITY
Criteria

• The Institute, by its very nature, will be located in a wetlands area in Atlantic County.

• (This does not exclude those areas that lie inland from the coastline.)

• Possible sites must be within a distance of five miles of a local high school.

• This will ensure that all high schools in the county will be part of the decision-making process.

• The institute should be within one mile of a NJ Transit bus route, where availability of bicycles will be provided.
• Possible sites must be located no further than five miles of a

Garden State Parkway or Atlantic City Expressway exit, for

easy tourist accessibility.

• The issue of Atlantic City is complicated. It lies along the

coast and attracts millions of tourists each year. However,

the noise and traffic (on land and sea) does not make the

city conducive to the type of establishment being planned.

Thus, the institute will be located within a range of two to

fifteen miles from the Atlantic City Tourism District, as

defined by the Economic Opportunity Act of 2013.

WETLANDS ENVIRONMENT: ATL_LU95
NJSCHOOLS
TRAN_BUS_ROUTE
EXIT_REST_AREA
ATLANTIC CITY TOURISM DISTRICT
aty_tour_dist
 METHODS

1. A new layer for wetlands (type 07 = wetlands)

will be created from alt_lu07.

2. A multiple ring buffer range of two to ten miles

from aty_tour_dist will be created. The desired
zone (Object ID 2) will be selected and
exported to a new data layer.

3. The buffer zone will be clipped to altmun.

4. Atlantic County schools will be extracted and

clipped from njschools (input), a database of
all New Jersey schools, to the buffer.
5. Atlantic County bus routes will be extracted and
clipped from Tran_bus_route (input), a layer of
all NJ Transit bus routes, to the buffer.

6. Parkway and Expressway exits will be extracted

and clipped to the buffer.

7. Create maps of distance from schools, bus

routes and exits using the spatial
analysis/Euclidean distance. These can be
reclassified in spatial analysis, applying the
correct distances based on the criteria.

8. These three rasters can be combined to create

a single composite in Raster Calculator.
Data and Data Sources

Study Area:

Atlantic County, New Jersey

Data Requirements

altmun: polygon shapefile; Professor Fan, Stockton University

atl_lu95: polygon shapefile; Professor Fan, Stockton University
njschool: point shapefile; Professor Fan, Stockton University
trans_bus_route: line shapefile; NJ GIN
aty_tour_dist: polygon shapefile; NJ Dept. of State
exits_rest_area: point shapefile; Atlantic County, Office of GIS
Data will be stored in a file database called Wetlands_Project.
The path to the database is” H:\Coursework\coursedata\Wetlands_Project.gdb”.