HAWK: Lakefront Property Locator
The Challenge:
The Friends of the Cobbossee Watershed, a vital non-profit environmental organization in Winthrop, Maine, faced a significant operational bottleneck. Every summer, they dedicated hundreds of hours of manual labor to identifying lakefront properties from town tax records and Google Earth data. This time-consuming process diverted critical resources and thousands of dollars away from their primary mission: protecting and cleaning the watershed, and almost entirely offset the donations they solicited from this process.
The Solution:
I developed HAWK, a custom Python script designed to automate the entire property identification process. By parsing and cross-referencing XML coordinate files from Google Earth with digital town tax commitment data, HAWK accurately identifies every lakefront property within a specified distance from the shoreline. What once took an entire summer of manual effort can now be accomplished in about an hour.
Map of Maranacook Lake Located in Winthrop and Readfield Maine. The red dots signify lakefront properties within a distance threshold of 100 meters.