Efforts in Land Use Education, Research and Coordination
Underway at MSU
Media Contacts: Laura Probyn or Amy
J. Baumer
Release Date: August 12, 2002
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- A new effort is underway at Michigan State
University (MSU) to bring together the university’s wide range
of land use-related research, outreach and educational efforts to
better serve citizens, local officials and municipalities. The effort
will coordinate and supplement numerous MSU resources aimed at meeting
the challenges posed by land use issues from water quality to urban
sprawl, farmland preservation, planning and zoning.
The two-year effort is funded by a development grant from the W.K.
Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Mich.
“The ultimate goal of the grant is to focus resources toward
informing public and private land use decisions and improving knowledge
regarding the use of Michigan’s land resources,” says
Carol Weissert, director of the MSU Institute for Public Policy
and Social Research (IPPSR) and the principal investigator. “A
major part of the effort will be improving coordination and integration
of
services.”
The core group of faculty members conducting that integration will
work in concert with Public Sector Consultants, a Lansing-based
policy analysis firm, to develop and use existing efforts and generate
new projects as needed.
A major focus of the effort will be to expand land use models predicting
changes in the state’s natural resources and population over
the next decade, and analyze why the changes are occurring
and how they will affect Michigan residents. A key part will be
making available to local governments uniform land use protocols
they can use to analyze land use/land cover digital maps.
Affiliated projects may include a survey of Michigan townships.
The survey would provide data on Michigan townships’ land use
tools, techniques, technologies and needs. This information would
be a resource for MSU Extension and research activities.
Other work includes building and broadening MSU Extension’s
Citizen Planner program, an educational short course for local planning
and zoning officials.
Weissert notes that the land use development grant will allow cooperators
to bring together technologies such as geographic information systems
(GIS), social scientists and grass-roots programs such as Citizen
Planner in one place. It will also help coordinate outreach activities
through MSU Extension and IPPSR.
Faculty members serving with Weissert as co-principal investigators
are Stuart Gage, Department of Entomology; Dick Groop, Geography
and Center for Remote Sensing; Lynn Harvey, Agricultural Economics;
and Scott Loveridge, Agricultural Economics and MSU Extension.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation was established in 1930 “to help
people help themselves through the practical application of knowledge
and resources to improve their quality of life and that of future
generations.” Its programming activities center around the
common vision of a world in which each person has a sense of worth;
accepts responsibility for self, family, community and societal
well-being; and has the capacity to be productive and to help create
nurturing families, responsive institutions, and healthy communities.
To achieve the greatest impact, the foundation targets its grants
to projects in health; food systems and rural development; youth
and education, and higher education; and philanthropy and volunteerism.
It also provides funding for information systems/technology, efforts
to capitalize on diversity, and social and economic community development
programming related to these areas. Grants are concentrated in the
United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the southern
African countries of Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa,
Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.
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