Published December 2002

TerraLogic helps clients visualize their data

Graphic courtesy of TerraLogic GIS To help evaluate historic channel movement — and the role of woody debris — of the Lower Hoh River on the Olympic Peninsula, TerraLogic produced a series of technical maps, such as the one above, detailing channel locations over a period of years.

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

A county that wants to create a land-use plan; a fire district that wants to better serve its area; a land trust that wants to protect the local habitat of eagles — what do they have in common?

They all have used the services of TerraLogic GIS, a Stanwood-based consultant of geographic information systems, or what principal Levon Yengoyan calls “spatial database management.”

“A lot of people equate it to maps and mapmaking, and that’s one of the traditional products that GIS has come up with, but it’s actually a lot more,” said Yengoyan, who started the company with principals Christopher Hansen and Jane Cassady in 1997.

For instance, by using mapping software with database software, Yengoyan is working with a fire district to study where past emergency calls have come from so that the district can better service that area in the future.

“It’s one thing to look at a spreadsheet that has 2,500 addresses in it, but you show them a map of the city and then put a point where every one of those calls are, you see hot spots,” he said. “You say, ‘Look at this area over here, maybe it’s not near a fire station, but we have a ton of calls there. We need to think about, in our long-range planning, how we can better service that area.

“Being able to visualize your data — it’s super-powerful in a whole lot of applications,” said Yengoyan, who learned about the power of GIS when he was a graduate student in wildlife biology studying how bobcats used managed forests.

“I caught them, radio-collared them, let them go and tracked them,” he said. “I used GIS to look at home ranges, look at habitats they were using and look at their movement patterns.”

Like Yengoyan with his background in wildlife biology, the six others on staff at TerraLogic bring a variety of expertise to the GIS field. Hansen is a natural-resource and land-use planner; Cassady is an environmental policy analyst; and there’s also a geographer and a marine scientist among them.

It’s that mixture of diverse backgrounds that gives TerraLogic an edge, Yengoyan said.

“Having an understanding of the scientific process, of planning, of whatever it is that we’re applying the technology to ... we can better work with our client to help them figure out how to get all they can out of GIS” he said.

As much as 70 percent of the work TerraLogic does is for the public sector, Hansen said, with the company often working with other consulting firms on a project, inventorying data and offering spatial analyses before passing it on to the land-use planners or environmental consultants to do their part.

The need for TerraLogic’s services has grown over the years, Hansen and Yengoyan said, with the passage of the state’s Growth Management Act more than a decade ago and other planning and environmental regulations since.

“For urban planning, a part of Growth Management is the development of a comprehensive plan for a city or county, and you can say that GIS is used as a living, breathing comprehensive plan itself,” Hansen said.

Using GIS, TerraLogic has in the past assisted Jefferson County in the development of land-use alternatives and Island County in its critical-areas mapping for its comprehensive plan.

“Once you get all your geographic information into the computer — your parcels, your wetlands, your streets and your infrastructure — then it’s easy to analyze and overlay information about your zoning, to estimate the amount of land you have left for building, to correlate population with land use,” Hansen said.

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