Mapping NJ Landscapes

I get a fair number of questions about where students, potential students, practitioners and just plain old fans of landscape architecture can go to see special landscapes nearby. As an initial list, I came up with a short, varied list of examples of landscapes that our students might see in the Garden State as a way of getting to know some places and spaces. But that list sparked an interest in something that dug a little deeper and, with the support of Rutgers' Department of Landscape Architecture, the Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis, and the NJ ASLA, we created a couple different online resources for exploring these.

First we created a database of landscapes that is available in multiple formats at the NJ Landscape Architectural Sites page. With just under 300 sites, the database can be explored as a GoogleEarth KML or as a pre-composed map in ZoomIt. If you grab the KML data, make sure you check out the different attributes.

More recently we created an interactive map interface at http://njlasites.rutgers.edu/ that allows users to use their browser as a way of exploring New Jersey's landscapes.

It is valuable to note that users can select a category to look more closely at. In the graphic below I selected out just campus designs.
We still hope to add a richer set of attributes available through a tab for each site as well as photos of the site, thousands of which were already taken by Jenna Pauloski. And, there have been some notable recent projects in New Jersey that we want to add (like the work by MVV on the Princeton Campus).