Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park (SAGA) located in Cornish, New Hampshire was the summer home of the celebrated Gilded Age sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The park contains several notable historic landscapes, but my work is focused on the landscape known as Aspet which includes the historic home of Saint-Gaudens. The name Aspet comes from the small French village in which Saint-Gaudens father was born, for which the house was named.
Throughout his time at the farm, Saint-Gaudens spent considerable time designing and altering the gardens and surrounding landscape to his liking. The resulting landscape was a classical design that tied together the many different spaces of the property. After his death in 1907, the farm was maintained by his widow Augusta and a private memorial group, the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial. During its management of the farm, some changes were made including exhibition of more sculptures in the landscape and the addition of a birch allée, among other projects. In 1965, the property was donated to the National Park Service which has been operating the site ever since.
The Olmsted Center has assisted with the management of SAGA’s cultural landscapes through work such as cultural landscape reports and inventories. Over the past few months I have been working on developing a GIS map and application to assist with vegetation maintenance and tracking for SAGA. My work involved utilizing the Historic Plant Inventory, the Hedge Management Plan, and the Cultural Landscape Reports to develop an application that synthesizes information from multiple sources.
SAGA was one of seven parks originally piloted for a Historic Plant Inventory in the early 1990s. The resulting map reflects the state of vegetation observed in 1993, focusing primarily on trees and shrubs in the landscape. In this map, each plant is identified by species, and a code which corresponds to a geographical zone, classification as a tree or shrub, and plant count. My task was to georeference and digitize the vegetation features illustrated in this map. This work was completed using tools in ArcGIS Pro software, a process essentially involving lining up the historic map with a current map in GIS and then creating feature classes based on the historic map. The Historic Plant Inventory also includes a map for the formal gardens, but this map depicts a very small geographical area and is highly detailed and therefore has not been included in this project for now.
The next step was to create a table in Excel containing data from the Historic Plant Inventory map along with information extracted from the Cultural Landscape Report. The information from the Historic Plant Inventory includes the zones, codes, and scientific and common names. The information from the CLR includes the locations, histories, conditions, and recommendations. This data was not available in table format, so I had to read through these documents and create my own table. CLI and FMSS data were also added to the table. I then joined the map with the tabular data, and added NPS Cultural Resource Standards for GIS. The result is a map that contains detailed information about each vegetation feature in the landscape.
Once this map was completed, the next task was to update current conditions and recommendations for each plant. I am currently based in Richmond, Virginia and was unfortunately not able to make a trip to the park during this time, but my supervisor, Michael Stachowicz, was able to visit and collect some new information for this project. Using ArcGIS Collector, he with assistance from park staff, updated condition assessments and took photographs for each point. This is the type of information we hope to record using a GIS application in the future.
Finally, after adding this new information to my dataset I was able to create an application using ArcGIS Web AppBuilder. This tool allows the user to build highly customizable apps that can run on any device, and includes a wide variety of widgets to provide fundamental functions. I selected just a few widgets for this project which I judged to be most relevant to our goals: Legend, Layers, Edit, Group Filter, and Print. The Legend widget displays a legend to help the viewer interpret the map’s symbology. The layers widget allows the viewer to adjust and customize the map’s different layers. The Edit widget provides tools that the viewer can use to edit attributes and attach files. The Group Filter widget allows the viewer to filter the vegetation layers by particular attributes including scientific name, condition, or recommendation. This gives the viewer the ability to create maps for specific maintenance purposes such as pruning, removals, and plantings. The Print widget gives the viewer the option to print a layout of their customized map. Other widgets may also be added in the future including Screening and Query widgets, which provide even more data analysis possibilities.
This application meets our goals of creating a tool that can be used in the field to collect data and make vegetation assessment a simpler task. It eliminates the need to reference multiple documents when performing maintenance work and succeeds in making this data more accessible than ever before. There are still adjustments that need to be made to make this app as useful as possible. Luckily, this type of application is incredibly customizable and user-friendly, meaning the park staff can easily make changes to meet their needs. In the future, the Olmsted Center hopes to expand this project to other parks that want a modern solution to vegetation assessment and maintenance.
Designing the Parks 