Virginia Department of Forestry

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Virginia Department of Forestry
Outlying Landing Field (OLF) Site Suitability
Prepared by Sara Shullaw GIS Program
Manager June 2007
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Objective

• Identify suitable OLF sites in Virginia that
  satisfy the following criteria
• Within 70 NM of Ocean Naval Air Station (original
  max distance was 50 NM)
• Airfield will occupy 2,000 acres and needs an
  additional 25,000 acre noise zone
• Avoid low population density areas (less than 50
  people per sq mile)

• Other environmental/ecological factors (e.g.
  wetlands) were not considered as constraints
  because it was understood that although
  environmentally sensitive areas could not be
  developed, they could be within the 25K acre
  noise zone.

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Methodology

• Suitable areas were identified by overlaying the
  3 criterion in a Geographic Information System
  (GIS) at 100 meter resolution
• Population density lt 50 people per sq mile
  (Census 2000)
• Rural housing density based on housing density
  projections developed by Dr. David Theobald with
  Colorado State University. The data provides
  projection of housing density to the year 2030.
• Rural forest and rural agriculture (source
  Radeloff, V. C., R. B. Hammer, S. I Stewart, J.
  S. Fried, S. S. Holcomb, and J. F. McKeefry.
  2005. The Wildland Urban Interface in the United
  States. Ecological Applications 15799-805 as
  reclassed by VDOF)
• The analysis did not extend beyond 30km south
  of the Virginia/North Carolina border.

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Methodology

• Population density lt 50 people per sq mile
  (Census 2000)

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Methodology
2. Rural housing density projected to 2030
(Dr. David Theobald with Colorado State
University)
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Methodology
3. Rural forest and rural agriculture
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Resulting Suitable Areas
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• In order to identify continuous areas that
  satisfy the criteria we shrunk all suitable areas
  by 30 cells (3 km). We filtered the results to
  those gt 2,000 acres resulting in 16 core sites
  with a 3km buffer that fall within 90 nautical
  miles of the centroid of Oceana Naval Air
  Station.

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• Expanded core sites by 30 cells to return 25k
  acre sites that meet all criteria

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Core Acreage vs. Total Acreage
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