Geographic Information Systems

The City of Niagara Falls Geographic Information System (GIS) is maintained and operated by the Office of Environmental Services. The GIS allows city officials and staff to analyze and present information on the city's land use, environmental and economic characteristics in map form.  

The GIS supports the missions of various city departments, including Planning and Environmental Services, the rest of Community Development including Economic Development, as well as the city's Inspections, Zoning and Assessor offices.

The City uses GIS software developed by ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute), a leading vendor of GIS software (www.esri.com). ESRI's Arc/Info and ArcView are run on both PC and Solaris platforms, and are accessed from the office's Macintosh systems via X-Windows.  The base map for the GIS is the City's digitized parcel map. The data associated with the parcels allow geographic analysis based on assessed-value, land-use, ownership, etc. The GIS also uses New York Power Authority digital orthographic photographs from 1999. The City also frequently uses the following data sets for analysis:

• Land-use classification
• Zoning
• 100-year and 500-year floodplains
• Soils / Geology / Contour Lines / Digital USGS maps
• Roads / Building outlines / City Right-of-Way
• Environmental pollution data

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