268— Nature Centers in New York State

Nature centers provide an informal education to the public about wildlife, ecology, and the environment. They can be owned privately or be run by parks. The purpose of this project was to create a GIS layer that maps the location of New York nature centers and holds information about them. The main vector layer of this project is a point layer representing the locations of nature centers in the state with fields including the name of the nature center, the park in which it is located, the county in which it is located, its website, its owner, the year it was founded, and its latitude and longitude. The data was inspired by a “State Nature Centers” dataset from New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Data was collected from nature center or park websites and from google maps. Any clusters and patterns of nature center locations were identified. A county population layer from NYS GIS Clearinghouse was downloaded, then the population was compared with the number of nature centers in each county. Nature centers were clustered unevenly, had several owner types, were more often created in recent years, and were related to county size and population.