The Norcross Wildlife Sanctuary GIS Program

Since 1998, the Sanctuary has used a GIS (Geographic Information System) to digitally map its property boundaries and trails, as well as other manmade and natural features.

To help us maintain this data, we (in cooperation with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation or DCR) have developed a software extension to aid in data development. The extension is an add-on to ESRI's ArcView desktop GIS software, and is available for free download.  For an overview of the Norcross/DCR Data editing extension, click here

If you are an ArcView user and would like a set of tools that extends ArcView's native data editing abilities, you can download the extension from DCR's website.

The extension provides enhanced tools for working with line shapefiles in an editing environment based loosely on ArcEdit, but with a Windows-style interface. Tools include Snap, Extend, Rotate, Move, Intersect, Split, and many more, including property survey (COGO) tools. More importantly, it has the ability to "build" topologically "clean" line themes into polygon themes, and vice-versa. So, you can manage your polygon data sets by unbuilding them, editing them as lines, and re-building them into polygons. You can also work with line and point themes. There is a detailed on line help file which will answer most questions about the extension.

This extension was designed for non-profits to manage their geographic datasets (particularly parcel maps) but may not be adequate for large datasets (like city assessor's maps).