Between 1832 and 1866, the US Government Land Office surveyed the area that would become Wisconsin. Surveyors divided the landscape into a grid of townships and sections while documenting information about vegetation, soils, wetlands, and cultural features. In the 1990s, the UW-Madison Forest Landscape Ecology Lab entered the historical survey data into a Wisconsin Historic Landscape database and linked the database to the public land survey system. In 2015, the Forest Landscape Ecology Lab and State Cartographer?s Office received an Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment grant to investigate ways to make the database more accessible to interested citizens, community organizations, individual landowners, government agencies, land information professionals, educators, and others. In the summer and fall of 2015, we held a series of Community Forums throughout the state to gather information and perform a user needs assessment. Attend this session to learn what we discovered and to participate in the ongoing effort to make the Historic Landscape database more accessible and more useful.
