Public and Private Golf Courses (Point Location), Virginia, 2002

Quality of life information is one of the factors taken into consideration when a business is deciding where to expand or relocate. The Virginia Economic Development Partnership has developed a golf course data layer to use while assisting businesses during this decision making process. The list of golf courses originally came from the 2001 Virginia Golf Course directory published by the Virginia Tourism Corporation in association with the Virginia State Golf Association (VSGA). Since that time, the list of courses has been updated using new directories as well. The final product includes boundaries (polygons) and points for public, private, semi-private, resort, and military golf courses in Virginia. The boundaries and points were originally located by geocoding street addresses and verifying and correcting the result using USGS DOQs (1994-1998) and SPOT satellite imagery (2001). Other sources for boundaries included the Virginia Atlas and Gazetteer and ADC street map books. The golf course locations were corrected in 2003 to match the Virginia Base Mapping Program imagery (VBMP), and all updates since that time have been based on the VBMP as well. The 2008 update was based on the 2007 VBMP imagery.

Purpose:

The purpose of this data is to provide a geographic representation of the location of each golf course for tourism and economic development. This data is also used in landuse classification projects. This data combined with infrastructure, utility, environmental sensitivity, labor, demographics and quality of life are used to select sites for new business based on prospects needs.