You are here:
MULTI-RESOURCE ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENTS ACROSS THE U.S. MID-ATLANTIC REGION: USE OF GIS AND THE ISSUE OF SCALE
Citation:
Rego, S. MULTI-RESOURCE ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENTS ACROSS THE U.S. MID-ATLANTIC REGION: USE OF GIS AND THE ISSUE OF SCALE. Presented at 19th Annual ESRI International User Conference, San Diego, CA, July 26-30,1999.
Description:
The U.S. EPA's Mid-Atlantic Integrated Assessment (MAIA) program is focusing on preparing State of the Region Reports. Individual resource reports have been prepared for landscapes, estuaries and streams. The program is ready to begin the integration of the information on the individual resources into multi-resource assessments and report on the overall environmental condition of the Mid-Atlantic region. We have been exploring the use of GIS as a tool to integrate information across resources. We have been examining potential relationships between landscape characteristics and surface water indicators, as well as addressing the issue of spatial scale for aggregation. GIS allows one to produce multiple data layers that can be viewed in an exploratory data analysis (EDA) approach to visually examine spatial patterns. This phase of the EDA was conducted with ArcView GIS. Results from the spatial visualization were then used to perform exploratory statistical techniques with spatially aggregated data in SAS. The initial statistical analyses were conducted on data spatially aggregated on 8 digit USGS HUCs (Hydrologic Unit Code). Preliminary results indicate that 8 digit HUC divisions may be too spatially heterogenous for developing relationships between landscape characteristics and surface water indicators. The next phase of the analyses involves spatial aggregation on 12 digit HUCs, which provides more spatially homogenous aggregations for use in the analyses.