Design and documentation of a Baltimore-Washington regional spatial database testbed for environmental model calibration and verification

Abstract

Recent efforts by scientists and managers to inventory, map, and model impacts of human activities on the environment have focused on land transformation and urbanization processes. To test the efficacy of any single model, algorithm or procedure which defines land transformation processes a standard database calibration reference resource is required. Therefore, a set of georeferenced, spatially structured and well documented data sets has been designed for the Baltimore-Washington Region as a test and evaluation resource for the community of environmental modelers and global change scientists. Land transformation processes are being examined from a variety of perspectives and scales using a variety of indicator parameters and mensuration variables. Tools and techniques applied to land transformation assessments range from creation of simple population expansion maps to change detection calculations using remotely sensed satellite data. A variety of point and cell growth models have been applied to simulate the land transformation phenomenon. These activities have demonstrated the reality that urbanization and land transformation processes involve complex interacting variables. A team of scientists are expanding the efforts of the USGS Human Impacts on Land Transformation (HILT) project to build an Internet accessible "collaboratory" containing quality controlled spatially referenced calibration and validation databases. The Baltimore-Washington Regional Testbed provides for the calibration, verification, and validation for multiple scalar, temporal, thematic, and spectral assessments or models. This design and documentation procedures for creating the Baltimore-Washington Regional "Collaboratory" are presented in relation to its use for environmental modeling applications.