Owen Bailey
Would you tell us a little bit about your background?
Dylan Taillie
I grew up in Caroline County on the Eastern Shore and went to North Caroline High. I went down to Louisiana to study environmental science and made my way back up to University of Maryland for my Master’s degree. I ended up working on the Chesapeake Bay report card at UMCES and doing a little bit of data analysis, but a lot of science communications. Then I saw this opportunity come up. During my Master’s I really leaned on GIS and I created a model for habitat suitability in Western Maryland. I saw this opportunity to do a little bit more of that GIS-related work, which I love doing, but it also had a communications point. So I get to spend part of my time in the data and actual software application solving problems and then I also spend part of my time doing that translation and communication, which is something that I’ve fostered since finishing up my Master’s.
Owen Bailey
Would you give us some examples of some recent projects that you worked on?
Dylan Taillie
We recently put out the wetland adaptation area data. We’ve been working on this sea level rise tool. And we have a marsh protection index — looking at conceptual marsh units done by USGS and creating an index to approximate how protective they are. That is hopefully going to help with some of the new climate pollution reduction grant money that we got and prioritizing where we’re doing landowner engagement and working with land conservancies. The coastal portion is definitely going to be centered in the southern Eastern Shore… Dorchester, Somerset. There’s roughly 100 required coastal resilience easement plans to be written. We’re hoping to have more of a template and the right questions to ask and then the right pieces to put into a plan for a landowner to hopefully follow if they decide to do an easement.
Owen Bailey
That’s tough. You really have to thread that needle for an easement that will survive into perpetuity, but also be adaptable.
Larisa Prezioso
That’s why it’s great that there’s the easement itself and then the management plan. The plan itself can be adaptive, similar to our forest stewardship plans or our soil water quality plants.
Owen Bailey
Well, tell us about this new mapping tool.
Dylan Taillie
We have been working on this project along with the Eastern Shore Regional GIS Cooperative [ESRGC] at Salisbury University and Sea Grant and Sea Grant extension, so the University of Maryland. It’s a grant from NOAA. North Beach, Chesapeake Beach, Anne Arundel County, and Annapolis City were putting in requests to have flood modelling done specifically for their area through our Outcome 2 funding. You use the sea level rise projections, and this little area gets to look at what’s vulnerable into the future and use that to work with their planners and their town managers. Not all towns have the resources or the wherewithal to apply for this funding and there’s a lot of vulnerable towns, municipalities, and counties that could use this data. So we put in for the funding to say, “Well, we’ll do this for the whole coastal zone, and we’ll create an application that’s maybe a little more user-friendly.”
We contracted with ESRGC to help with the data development. We wanted a tool to fill some gaps. There’s already a few tools. There’s the NOAA sea level rise viewer, for example, which is a great tool. It shows one-foot increments with fairly coarse resolution and has a few other little pieces to it that are terrific. We actually worked with NOAA a little bit to borrow some of their code.
We also wanted potential end users to help define the goals of the project. So that’s where Sea Grant and Sea Grant Extension came in. They did, I think, nine different focus groups for county, GIS, other state agencies and different potential end users of the tool. Residents can also use the tool, but we really want it to be focused towards folks who are doing planning.
Owen Bailey
As a member of a Planning Commission, I could say that I very much appreciate this new tool as we’re doing our comprehensive plan update.
Dylan Taillie
Yeah! I’m excited. We’re hoping to get some webinars together and help folks to integrate the tool into things like their comprehensive plans and hazard mitigation plans.
Larisa Prezioso
What are some of the differences between your tool and the NOAA tool?
Dylan Taillie
The tool is higher resolution—one meter resolution in some places, two meter resolution in some places. It has a closer zoom than NOAA’s tool. It has Maryland-specific data. You can turn Critical Area boundaries on and look at how the Critical Area boundary compares to future sea level rise projections.
We do hope to take it to the next step and use some of the data to look at vulnerable buildings. Right now we have building footprints on there and that’s Maryland-specific data. You can look at sea level change data or high tide flooding data or Hurricane Isabel’s previous flood levels and maybe see what was predicted to have been inundated. We do have, at each tide gauge, the highest level that was recorded during the hurricane or during a high tide flooding event. So for someone who’s planning, you could look at—where is the high tide expected to reach in 2070? Or you could also say, “We’re planning for 10 of these high tide floods a year.” And then go click on historic flooding or flooding from recent memory. Historic flood levels are something that is new to that tool.
I should note that our app is only for coastal flooding in the Coastal Zone. [The Coastal Zone includes the 17 counties that border the Bay and have some tidal influence. This includes Baltimore City.] We have been talking about potentially expanding it once they get some rainfall-related flooding data to cover a little bit more, which would be helpful even in Kent County.
Owen Bailey
One thing I’ve noted the last couple of years is just how good GIS is as this medium to tell stories that get lost in raw data. We have all this data and stories to be told, but it’s just it’s not decipherable, at least not to the average person. A storm doesn’t just “hit Maryland.” It hits the Eastern Shore. It hits Kent County, but misses Talbot County. Hits Baltimore worse than Cambridge. Are there other stories that have popped out to you for some of the tool’s uses?
Dylan Taillie
Well it has layers that go on top. On our MyCoast application you can go and submit your photos of flooding in your neighborhood as it happens. One thing that’s been validating is clicking on the high tide flooding layer and then you can turn on the MyCoast reports and say, “Oh hey, somebody took a picture here where it does say that it’s predicted to flood.” And you might go over to the MyCoast app and say, “What did Cambridge look like when it was experiencing high tide flooding?” But we’re still hoping to develop more stories. The completion of the high-resolution data was a really big lift. But now that we have it I think that there are opportunities for more stories, more analyses that could assist counties and similar planners in understanding historic events or what’s going to happen in the future.
Owen Bailey
Speaking from a Planning Commission, as we’re updating our comp plan, we’re looking at the water resource development. We have all these PDF maps on different pages, but they don’t really tell any stories because you can’t really overlay PDF on PDF. It doesn’t have the value it would in a GIS map.
Larisa Prezioso
So you’re talking about a GIS complement to a report? That makes a lot of sense.
Owen Bailey
Yes. Absolutely. The comp plan is supposed to be 10-year document. But the data they put in there is probably out of date a year into the comp plan. So anybody else coming to look at it is working off of old data. So if you need to you could have a PDF file just to have a static map and then have an asterisk that says: “*For most recent data go to this “link.””
Dylan Taillie
Yeah, yeah, that’s really neat. Right now I think we have a good amount of overlays on there and there’s the ability to add your own data. We have some hopes for a 2.0 version of the app depending on whether we work with MDE on the funding. But we’ve got the FEMA flood hazard zones for your 100-year and 500-year floods, there’s Critical Area boundaries, there’s parcel boundaries, building footprints, and there’s some level of environmental data. We have a version of the Chesapeake Conservancy’s land cover data set. We also have an e-mail address that Christine and I and one of our new staff Leah check regularly. We’re very open to feedback.
Larisa Prezioso
I’m definitely thinking about it a lot from the perspective of the shoreline projects that I work on. You can imagine an engineer might be able to even use it. I know the tide gauge data is available, but as the grant writer, I could easily visualize that for grant applications. for.
Owen Bailey
We had value per acre analysis done with Urban3 that shows the impacts of sea level rise and local governments and their funding. It’d be great to have more detailed information about exactly how communities are going to be impacted by sea level rise and flooding events. We were able to get a DNR grants gateway award for the Town of Chestertown to do comprehensive rezoning.
We have this data now, but how can it be implemented? How can it actually drive policy that can lead to better outcomes and land uses? So now we get to do that with Chestertown and now we have even more data for the town to work with. We can say: This community or this bridge that leads into this one community—it’s going to be inundated. We’re going to think of how that community can, you know, access the rest of town. There’s one road in and out. Or there’s Wilmer Park, one of the most popular parks in town. How can that park help with protecting nearby communities? Or how can that park be adapted to sea level rise? And exactly when do we need to adapt it? Because the park’s fine as it is right now, but we know it’s not going to be fine as it is in the future. We have to prepare for it and how that will work.
Dylan Taillie
Integrating that into planned renovations, that’s exciting. I’m excited for that project to get started.
Owen Bailey
You mentioned working with ESRGC on this project. Can you tell us how that came about or what services they provided?
Dylan Taillie
We have worked with them a bit on critical boundaries updating and they translate Lidar into digital elevation models for the state. They’re a terrific group. They did the data development side of things, so creating the flood layers at six-inch intervals and all the technical aspects of creating that data.
Owen Bailey
I love working with them, especially through their Circuit Rider program, helping towns with GIS mapping when most towns don’t have that capability. We’re trying to get more towns to use it. In Chestertown, we never had any of our zoning on a GIS map. You just had to look at the color-coding map. But how does that match up with flooding or how does that match up with vulnerable road user data or with school districts? When you start stacking those uses, you get to see those stories. But you have to have that data in GIS, otherwise you can’t stack it. Now our zoning is on GIS and you can click by parcel and figure out exactly where your house is. It’s also helpful as we talk about what zoning is. A lot of people don’t know what zoning is.
Dylan Taillie
You mentioned using similar layers for when you’re doing site visits and presenting vulnerability of a parcel or potential easement. Are there other ways that Eastern Shore Land Conservancy might use the new tool?
Larisa Prezioso
I’m interested in it based on our buffer stewardship. Every conservation easement (if it’s tidally influenced or is on a waterway) has language in that easement saying there has to be a 50-foot buffer or 100-foot buffer. It varies easement to easement.
We’re trying to improve the way that we actually enforce and steward those terms, because so much has changed over 30 years that the easements we did in 1990 are way more vague than the ones that we do now. Do we start at the tidal edge? Do we go to mean high water line? Looking at sea level rise and even shoreline erosion, how is that going to push those buffers inland? Are we going to have to start converting farm fields into the buffer area?
Owen Bailey
Yeah, and going back to helping influence comprehensive plans and zoning updates. We’re making sure that data gets in there. Both as a member of the Planning Commission for Chestertown, but also for my role at ESLC, we’re advocating for creating comprehensive plans that are easy to read for local people, not just for planners and developers. So that your average person can read your comp plan and understand the influence on their property. Don’t worry about having so many static maps in your comp plan, but have links to dynamic information that’s going to change over time. You can go there and find a whole host of other data that is not on that one page of that comp plan. It could also help towns. Where is your critical infrastructure? Is it in the floodplain? In Chestertown you have a pump station right down next to that pedestrian boardwalk. That pump station is going to have to be moved one day. But when? We put a lot of infrastructure in bad places and it’s all going to have to be moved eventually. But knowing when exactly it needs to be moved builds us that time to address the urgent needs now and put that in the time frame in a way that’s appropriate and feasible.
Dylan Taillie
Yeah, you can plan for that financial burden on the area or for potential grants. I definitely think that is going to be a really good use of it. We hope when UMCES puts out the sea level rise projections, we do a sea level rise guidance document for how to read it and get your risk tolerance for your specific project area. So the water pump station might have a different risk tolerance than a marsh or living shoreline project or something like that. We have a few case studies of how to use the tool that go along with the website and and one of them is directed towards sort of figuring out your risk tolerance. Because there’s a slider bar, you can click up to 2050, 2070, 2100.
I was just doing some work down in Pocomoke City and they have this one vulnerable park, Cypress Park. The pickleball course can get wet, but then the electrical station that is on the ground, that is the lights for the pickleball courts… well, that is you know… there’s a difference.
Owen Bailey
Having that information is critical. We have to have data.
Dylan Taillie
Yeah. And then we have to have people like you guys to use it and translate it.
Larisa Prezioso
It’ll be very informative. I keep thinking about these new coastal resiliency easements. You have something that’s static and prescriptive. But then there’s also references to something that’s more dynamic and can be addressed because you never know what’s going to happen. Things can be unpredictable. You don’t want to be locked into something that’s too prescriptive without accounting for the variability of unpredictability.
