Infrastructure construction and maintenance are critical to a community's sustainability and vitality. Rapid population growth has resulted in inadequate infrastructures in communities in many areas of the country. Building and maintaining the infrastructure, such as roads and buildings, require large volumes of three natural resources: aggregate (primarily crushed stone, sand, and gravel), water, and energy. As urban areas expand, local sources for these resources become depleted, inaccessible, and more costly to recover. Because of exploding population growth, the Denver metropolitan area must now deal with conflicting claims between urbanization and preserving the natural resources needed to sustain urbanization.

An interdisciplinary team of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists along with collaborators from the public and private sector are generating information on the natural resources critical for the infrastructure needed by growing urban areas and developing methodology to help in the planning process. The Rocky Mountain Mapping Center's role in this project is to:

• develop a temporally consistent database framework on which all the other layers generated by the project scientist will be placed,
• identify those critical components that define the landscape along the Front Range,
• develop land characterization models that will help both the technical and non technical person understand the nature of the land and make informed decisions and assessments,
• model historical urban growth and use this information to predict future growth,
• develop a Group Spatial Decision Support System (GSDSS) tool to demonstrate the utility of natural resource data to aid planning agencies in making land use decisions, and
• develop techniques to identify and characterize vegetation and land use patterns.

The project has temporal mapping and land surface characterization components similar to the Middle Rio Grande Basin Study and the Urban Growth Project.

Project Lead: Carol Mladinich