Exurban Sprawl in the Northern Forest:
The Role of Local Planning in Conserving
Ecosystem Goods and Services
Stephanie Elson and Steve Hamburg
New England 's towns have been developing steadily over the past several decades. Largely driven by the isolated decisions of individual landowners converting their forested or agricultural lands to alternative uses, towns have been making the change from rural communities to exurban and suburban communities (Figure 1). Often, people and local governments do not recognize this transformation until after it has occurred. The land fragmentation that results from unplanned development can have various impacts that may not be in line with the town's vision of its future; impacts include the eroding of the town's productive forest land base, harming the scenic views and rural character of the town, disrupting wildlife habitat, and threatening water quality, among other things. Thus, local-level isolated decisions can together have devastating effects.
Two problems are addressed in this research. First, many communities do not put the required effort into local planning until after they feel the strains of development, working reactively instead of proactively (Figure 2). Second, communities do not have access to available science that they need to inform their decision making processes. With these two problems in mind, the current research asks: how can New England communities merge community goals with existing scientific data and come up with a sustainable plan for future development? This research uses GIS-based proactive planning as one possibility for achieving this connection, integrating a community's vision with existing science to help towns make informed decisions towards a sustainable future in line both with the towns' individual goals and values (Figure 3).
Figure 1. Change in NH Towns Population Density Categories, 1950-2025.
Data Sources: U.S. Census, 1950 - 2000. 2025 Population projections from NH Office of Energy and Planning, published in SPNHF, 2005. This research used the population density categories defined by DM Theobald. "Placing exurban land-use change in a human modification framework." Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2004. Rural: <36 residents / sq. mile; Exurban: >36<144 residents / sq. mile; Suburban: >144<1,000; Urban: >1,000.
Note: The exurban category holds relatively consistent over time. This is due to the fact that as towns experience population growth, some move into the 'exurban' category out of the 'rural' category, while other towns move out of the 'exurban' category into the 'suburban' category.
Figure 2. The image on the left shows the distribution of rural, exurban, suburban and urban towns in the state of New Hampshire . The image on the right shows the distribution of towns with demonstrated investment in planning to manage growth. Notice how the second map roughly mirrors the first, demonstrating that efforts to manage development often occur as a reaction to change, thus mitigating the effects that plans could have if put in place proactively.
Figure 3. Here, alternate regulatory scenarios were hypothetically imposed upon the town of Campton , and their impact on attributes deemed valuable by town residents were assessed. The blue areas in each image represent regions of high co-occurrence of several landscape features that town members consider important. You can see by the way that these areas show through the non-buildable regions in the right-hand image that this regulatory scenario would do a lot in terms of preserving high-value regions in town.
Updated
05/22/2008
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