Abstract

Impact of Human behavior on the Mojave Desert ecosystem
Track: Environmental Management
Authors: Alexander Gole

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the Mojave Desert Ecosystem Program (MDEP) are researching the Mojave Desert's ecosystem recovery pace in areas that were impacted by old mining towns. In order to observe the change overtime of the landscape, the USGS scientists and MDEP need GIS for quantifying this change in three-dimensional models.
This project requires both aerial photography and satellite images of the studied area that were collected by USGS at different time intervals.
Processed in ArcGIS, the data is analyzed in order to show the land use and land cover of the studied areas. To display the newly created data, three dimensional data models are built on ArcInfo and made available other the internet on an ArcGIS server.
In addition, a file geodatabase is created to store the collected data and the new data generated after the analysis.