The SCO’s latest online app is the Bordner Survey Viewer, which replaces the old Coastal Bordner Survey Explorer.
As discussed in a previous blog post, The Bordner Survey was a massive 1930s-era effort to map land use across the state. The genesis of the project was an attempt to understand the impacts of land use decisions made decades earlier. In northern Wisconsin, most forested land had been cut, and attempts to farm this land often met with failure. In 1927, the Wisconsin state government and the University of Wisconsin agreed to collaborate on a detailed land inventory of northern Wisconsin, to provide accurate information about land use and land suitability for agriculture and forestry. The effort was led by John Bordner, a Wisconsin farmer who earned a PhD in plant physiology in 1908. Bayfield was the first county completed by the Bordner Survey (technically the Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory). The project expanded to cover the entire state with the exception of Milwaukee and Menominee Counties.
Scanned versions of the original Bordner Survey maps were digitized by UW-Madison and UW-Platteville staff and students over a period of about ten years. Several hundred staff and students were involved in the effort. In 2024-25, with the help of funding from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, a statewide version of the dataset was created by the State Cartographer’s Office by merging all of the previously digitized pieces. The final step in the process was to create the new online map viewer. The new viewer includes all polygons from the paper maps. Lines and points have not yet been completed.
The new app was built primarily by Joseph Kowalczyk, an SCO student intern in the summer of 2025 and a graduate student in GIS at UW-Madison. SCO staffers Mike Hasinoff and Hayden Elza also contributed, as did Matt Noone at the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission.
The statewide Bordner dataset is also available for download on Geodata@Wisconsin. The user guide document can be found here. The user guide includes field descriptions for the attributes for each polygon, and describes how the land cover categories were created for the final map display in the new app.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes to explore this rich and unique historic geospatial dataset.