FoxHershockMappingCommunities

DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL COMMUNITY CAPACITY THROUGH SPATIAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY:
THE CASE OF TRINITY COMMUNITY GIS
wider socioethical impacts. This research project analyzes
an attempt to implement a community capacity-building
model aimed at empowering people to address
community concerns more effectively locally, and to better
represent community interests in regional, state, and
national policy arenas.
TRINITY COMMUNITY GIS
TC GIS, an NGO in Trinity County in northwestern
California, began its effort to disseminate SIT in 1993 with
the goals of: (1) developing local community capacity to
use SIT; (2) providing local access to and training in the use
of GIS and GPS technologies; and (3) helping provide new
avenues of employment to local people for SIT-related
work. A further goal was to promote the use of SIT in ways
that would include local knowledge and experience in
planning for public and private land management and to
encourage collaborative development of new approaches
to landscape analysis and ecosystem management (USDA,
Forest Service 1994). In sum, TC GIS has worked to
enhance communications between the rural periphery,
including public lands, and the administrative centers at the
regional, state, and federal levels.
History
TC GIS emerged from a particular context of change in
natural resource policy and management and of newly
emerging technology. In the early 1990s, land
management in the Pacific Northwest of the United States
changed dramatically when a federal court injunction
required the federal government to come up with a new
approach to public forest management, resulting in large
decreases in timber volumes harvested from public lands,
which in turn created severe economic problems in forest
dependent communities (USDA, Forest Service 1994).
Trinity County is a 2,000,000 acre mountainous, and remote
county with a population that has been stable at around
14,000 for forty years or more. Over 75 percent of the land
is managed in national forests by the federal government.
The shift away from timber management toward ecosystem
management on public lands in this highly forestdependent
county had been played up into an ugly “jobs
vs. the environment” conflict situation. As a result, a group
of volunteers, representing the full range of local natural
resource stakeholders and the United States Forest Service,
formed the Trinity Bioregion Group (TBRG), using
consensus to find common ground on forest policy issues
and to make recommendations regarding USFS
management decisions.
At the same time, SIT was beginning to become available
to public agencies. The emerging use of SIT for public
resource management had implications relevant to both
forest management and to rural communities near national
forests. First, by its nature as a form of “remote sensing”
rather than on-site assessment, there was considerable
potential for error in SIT application. Second, the advent of
SIT led to new employment opportunities for those trained
to use the technology. Members of the TBRG sought to
ensure their access to GIS. In 1993, the TBRG contacted
two UC-based researchers interested in testing a
community capacity-building alternative to the external
consultant model of SIT dissemination. John Radke and
Yvonne Everett agreed to work with the TBRG, and Everett
went on to become co-director of TC GIS.
With coordinated funding support for a pilot project from
the UC Berkeley Cooperative Extension, the California State
Resources Agency, and several federal agencies, one of the
researchers and two TBRG members initiated Trinity
Community GIS in the small Trinity County town of Hayfork.
TC GIS began building local GIS capacity by meeting
regularly with a TBRG GIS committee, and by writing
curricula for and teaching entry-level mapping and GIS
courses that included such skills as map reading,
photointerpretation, use of GPS units, digitizing,
geopositioning, database development, spatial data
manipulation, output development, and introductory GISbased
landscape analysis. At this time, TC GIS also began
a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with the
Watershed Research and Training Center (WRTC), another
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