Project ATLAS began in 2017 with the goal of providing a one-stop shop for all the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s (NCDOT) GIS and project-related data needs. ATLAS is an acronym for Advancing Transportation through Linkages, Automation, and Screening. The program improves business processes by providing up-to-date, authoritative natural resource data and a storage framework to support informed project development. Linkages across previous data silos and business processes, across systems, and among projects in the same geographic regions. Automation to standardize and store project GIS data and documents created throughout project development. Screening by using GIS data for project to inform project scoping and identify critical natural resource features in a study area without needing to be a GIS professional to gain spatial intelligence about a project. To accomplish those goals, we have 3 web-based applications for transportation project stakeholders, and a 4th application to allow the NCDOT ATLAS Team to update application content and GIS layers at-will without the need for IT requests.
- The Search Tool is our primary ATLAS Map interface. There are more than 700 GIS data layers available for viewing and downloading via the ATLAS search tool. Formats include file geodatabase, shapefiles, or CADD layers. This helps our project stakeholders coalesce around consistent project spatial data sources.
- The Screening Tool is used to quickly evaluate a project study area against key GIS data layers, to allow a quick assessment of a project study against critical GIS layers, learn what resources may or may not be impacted by your project before conducting field work. Customized screening templates are being developed to meet the specific data and reporting needs of individual business units.
- The ATLAS Workbench captures key data points (GIS and qualitative information about project processes and status) and project artifacts (GIS and critical project documents) To standardize the collection and collaboration, and extract key information embedded in reports to easy communication about project findings. This sets the stage for informing machine learning models in the future.
Since its inception, ATLAS has created more the 70 environmental layers including:
- Wetland predictive models (winner of a 2011 FHWA Environmental Excellence award)
- ATLAS Hydrography layer which includes headwater stream predictive models for a more extensive statewide stream layer and over 70 attributes to unify many traditional stream layers
- Protected species habitat machine learning models. During the first test of these models on a large broadband installation project, NCDOT found a previously unknown population of White irisette.
- Tidal influence zone map which lays the ground work for additional models such as coastal infrastructure vulnerability and resiliency ATLAS has over 1200 registered users and with significantly more expected in the near future. Since go-live in 2018, more than 4,000 ATLAS Screening Reports have been generated, more than 320,000 individual layers have been screened, and more than 53,000 individual GIS layers have been downloaded by ATLAS users.