This site was developed as part of a project sponsored by the National Park Service to increase public awareness of and access to data relevant to regional planning in the Blue Ridge Parkway Region. The goal is to assist with solving land development problems by providing a search mechanism that allows all  parties interested in planning for the Blue Ridge Parkway Region to access each other’s data. The National Park Service (NPS) maintains three separate parks in the region-Shenandoah, Blue Ridge Parkway, and Great Smoky Mountains–each with surrounding lands data bases. This site contains links to the NPS data and to data for the Blue Ridge Parkway Region maintained by other agencies and organizations, including The Southern Appalachian Assessment GIS Data base, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management, and NCSU’s Western North Carolina Region Data System.

This data base contains 15 data sets for Shenandoah National Park and 9 data sets for Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  These data sets and associated metadata are available on the NPS GIS Web site.  Data can be searched from the “Available GIS Data and Metadata from the NPS” link. 

http://www.nps.gov/gis/ 

The Southern Appalachian Assessment GIS Database 

The Southern Appalachian Assessment (SAA) project  was coordinated by the Southern Appalachian Man and Biosphere (SAMAB) program. The SAA GIS Data base (version 3.0) provides over 200 ARC/INFO data layers for an eight state region, including Shenandoah, Blue Ridge Parkway, and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. The database contains extensive information about the region's ecosystems and its air, water, and land resources. This database was assembled with primarily publicly available data from federal and state agencies. 

http://www.samab.org/data/SAA_data.html 
 

Tourism data for North Carolina is compiled by the NCSU Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management in conjuction with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service Tourism Outreach and Research Program. The program focuses on providing assistance in community planning efforts for development of sustainable tourism and the maintenance of statistics which represent the economic, social and environmental impacts of tourism in North Carolina. The database includes hotel inventory information by economic region and impact of U.S. resident travel on North Carolina counties. 

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/tourism/optr/index.htm 
 

Western North Carolina Region Data System 

NCSU is currently developing a database, based on geographic information systems technology, that is designed to assist regional planning efforts in a 24-county region of western North Carolina.  This region encompasses all of the Blue Ridge Parkway counties in North Carolina.  The database, called the Western North Carolina Region Data System, includes a wide variety of data relevant to regional planning such as socioeconomic and population trends, natural resources and environmental factors, and transportation information.  We are currently exploring technical and legal procedures for providing public access to these data. This site is under construction and should be available in August 1999.