Wetland database : A tool for land use decisions

Land use decisions are made at the local level by lay boards and comminissions in the 169 Connecticut cities and towns. Board members need information that is easy to understand and is technically defensible as a planning tool. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) recognized that need and partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to develop a method to evaluate the functions and values of wetlands (Ammann, 1986) for use by people with limited scientific knowledge of wetlands. The results of this method provide the city/town with resource information of all wetlands in the project area, a comparative rating system for 14 values, functions and uses of the wetlands, maps ready for digitizing into a geographic information system (GIS), and graphs and tables. This method does not determine which wetland value, function, or use is most important to the community. The community determines importance values. The wetland database allows the towns to view wetlands as a system rather than looking at each wetland as an isolated unit

Preventing flood damage through the use of automated flood warning systems and floodproofing of structures

The Connecticut Automated Local/Statewide Evaluation in Real Time(ALERT) system is an automated early flood warning system. The ALERT system was installed in Connecticut by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in cooperation with DEP in 1985. The system was installed as a direct result of severe flooding that killed 13 persons in June 1982. The purpose of the flood warning system is to aid the DEP and National Weather Service (NWS) in issuing faster flood watches and warnings, and to assist communities in responding more rapidly to flash flooding. The system consists of 48 rainfall gauges, 21 river gauges, 6 weather stations, and 3 coastal tide gauges (1995). These gauges monitor rainfall and river levels statewide, and transmit their data via VHF radio signals to a pair of computer base stations in Hartford, Connecticut. Radio repeaters are used to relay data from the field gages to the centrally located computers