2010 Floodplain Conservancy District   Now that the 2010 FEMA flood insurance rate map flood zones have been updated and adopted, Concord's floodplain conservancy district has been updated as well. The Floodplain Conservancy District is a zoning layer in the Town of Concord that consists of the 100-year flood zone from the 2010 FEMA flood zone mapping. For more information on the new FEMA mapping, please contact the Planning Division at 978-318-3290.

2010 FEMA Flood Plain Mapping  The 2010 FEMA flood plain mapping is now available on the WebGIS site and the WebGIS Kiosks located in the Assessing office and Department of Planning and Land Management office. The 2010 FEMA flood plain layer replaces the 1987 flood plains for flood insurance purposes. FEMA adopted the new mapping in June of 2010, and this was accepted at Concord's Annual Town Meeting the previous April. The 1987 mapping is also still available on the sites for comparison purposes, as some changes did occur. The changes are generally, but not always small, and are due to a number of factors including improved mapping practices, and updated mapping coordinate system, and in some cases incorporation of amp revisions and changes that had been filed in the years between 1987 and 2010. An example of the latter would be the area of Mill Brook between the Concord River and Main Street, where the flood plan in 1987 was mapped at an incorrect elevation. This was corrected for the 2010 mapping. for more information on the new FEMA mapping, please contact the Planning Division at 978-318-3290.

Bing tab added!  New to the public WebGIS site this week is access to Bing mapping. Across the top of the map frame on the WebGIS site there are several tabs. Starting from the left, the first is the Maps tab, followed by the Print, Help and now the Bing tab. The Maps tab is selected when the page first loads and displays Concord's own GIS data. The Print tab is chosen when a user wants to print a custom map using Concord's GIS data. The Help tab includes some information on how to use the features of the site. The Bing tab opens a view within Cocnord's WebGIS page showing Bing's Bird's Eye photography of the area the user was viewing in the Maps tab. Bing's Bird's Eye imagery is oblique angle aerial imagery provided by Pictometry International Corporation. This imagery set is collected from 4 separate directions, allowing the user to rotate the view to be from north, south, east or west. This gives the user a unique persepctive not available from traditional vertical aerial imagery. If the user moves the Bing map or zooms the Bing map in or out, when switching back to the Maps tab the map will shift accordingly.

New fill window option-  Many users, especially those with large screens, will be happy with the new fill window option. Under the Bing tab there are two buttons. The left button is selected when the page first loads and displays the WebGIS page at a default size. For users with large screens this often means that there is a lot of wasted space around the map. Users who have smaller screens or who have the screen resolution set very low will sometimes find that even the default, smaller page size is too large and they have to scroll the page up or down, left or right, in order to see everything. The new fill screen button solves these problems. The right-hand button on the Bing tab will set the page to automatically adjust itself to fir every user's browser window, regardles of screen size or resolution settings. Also, by clicking "Save Settings" on the General tab to the left of the map window, the site will save a "cookie" on your computer that will tell Concord's WebGIS page to always load in fill window mode!

Basic metadata-  Basic metadata now available. Metadata is essentially, data about data. We have now added a feature that makes each layer name in the list of map layers a link. When a user clicks on one of these layer name links, a small window will appear with some basic information about the layer. For many layers the information will be very basic, but for some layers there will be information describing the intent of the layer, or how it was created, along with links to additional information on other web pages.