You are here:
CONFRONTING THE MODIFIABLE AREAL UNIT PROBLEM FOR INFERENCE ON NITRATE IN REGIONAL SHALLOW GROUND WATER
Citation:
Faulkner*, B P. CONFRONTING THE MODIFIABLE AREAL UNIT PROBLEM FOR INFERENCE ON NITRATE IN REGIONAL SHALLOW GROUND WATER. ASCE EWRI World Water & Env. Congress, Philadelphia, PA, 06/23-27/2003.
Description:
This work addresses a potentially serious problem in synthesis of
spatially explicit data on ground water quality from wells, known to
geographers as the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). Investigators
are faced with choosing a level of aggregation appropriate to
answer questions at that scale, and resulting inferences are dependent
on the choice made. This paper presents a proposed solution
to the MAUP for regional ground water data interpretation. The
approach uses Bayesian inference, and a Bayes likelihood with the
Akaike information criterion for optimal mapping. An example is presented
by evaluating risk of loading of nitrate to shallow ground water
for the U.S. Geological Survey's National Water Quality Assessment
(NAWQA) data from rural wells in Maryland. The method facilitates
informative and parsimonious reporting of risk at a scale useful to
planners, and can also be used to identify areas of data deficiency.