Pocatello Population Growth Scenario
Idaho State University Participants
Di Wu, Donna Delparte, Shannon Kobs-Nawotniak
Partners and Affilation
Hannah Sanger - City of Pocatello
Research Problem
Use high resolution GIS data and models incorporating with city guidelines and development plans to generate future scenarios of city of Pocatello. These scenarios could bring insights on future land cover and land use changes, zoning changes, and the related ecosystem services changes, which in turn could further alter the regional housing supply, employment and population growth.
Research Outcomes
To accomplish this, we have partnered with the City of Pocatello (Idaho). We had organized meetings for discussing data collection, city guidelines and development plans. We've completed majority of the data collection, created new data for model input, and did a test run of the model. We expect to discuss with city and county planners for detailed city development plans, and create more model specified data, and do more test run of the models, and more interesting is to examine the model sensitivity analysis of certain city regulation.
Potential Impacts
Model is an efficient way for getting quick detailed future scenario. The computing and analysis capacity of model could provide real time scenario statistics results, i.e. land use, building, employment rate and population. Through making changes of city regulation, which is also an important part of modeling process, the statistics result could change accordingly. These model results could also indicate the efficiency of current city regulations and development plan. Moreover, current GIS visualization technology could convert 2D map into 3D map. Model scenarios could be visualized as 3D map which supports user exploration. Therefore, model results can be accessed by researchers, partners and stakeholders for reviewing and suggesting the ecosystem services changes in these scenarios. The sensitivity analysis of certain city regulation also provides further information about how we could approach to a more sustainable development plan.
