| dc.description.abstract |
Managers at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune must evaluate the environmental impacts
of their proposed development plans. The effect of land cover changes on water quality
is an important consideration for these evaluations. An interactive geospatial tool
was developed in 2009. The tool allows managers to interactively select their proposed
development site and input what the proposed land cover will be for the site. The
tool returns the changes in average ammonium concentration in the tributary creeks.
The tool incorporates water quality data collected by the DCERP project from 2008-2009
to drive the prediction model.
The purpose of this project was to (1) improve usability of the tool to make it a
spatial decision support system, (2) update the water quality data used to drive the
statistics of the water quality prediction models, and (3) determine if using the
National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) from 2006 instead of the 2001 NLCD changes the
relationship between land cover predictors and water quality response variables.
Tool usability was enhanced by adding in-tool and external help menus, creating a
user guide, and adding the ability to name and save outputs. The updated tool allows
the user to run multiple land development scenarios for comparison without overwriting
the previous results. Adding additional water quality data from 2007-2010 resulted
in fewer significant water quality prediction models. The most predictive of these
models was for organic nitrogen. The model, predicted by barren (rock/sand/clay),
shrub/scrub, and grassland/herbaceous land covers, was incorporated into the decision
support tool. Using land cover data from 2001 and 2006 allowed the same two water
quality parameters to be predicted: NOx and ON. Managers at Marine Corps Base Camp
Lejeune can use this data driven Spatial Decision Support System to evaluate how different
development scenarios will affect the concentration of organic nitrogen in the tributary
creeks on base.
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