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Northern
California ATtILA Background
Environmental management practices are trending away from simple, local-scale assessments toward complex, multiple-stressor regional assessments. Landscape ecology provides the theory behind these assessments, while geographic information systems (GIS) supply the tools to implement them. A common application of GIS is the generation of landscape metrics, which are quantitative measurements of the environmental condition or vulnerability of an area (e.g., ecological region or watershed). Generation of these metrics can be a difficult, lengthy process, requiring substantial GIS experience. The goal behind ATtILA is to provide an interface that allows users to easily calculate many common landscape metrics regardless of their level of GIS knowledge. Four metric groups are currently included in the package (e.g., Landscape Characteristics, Riparian Characteristics, Physical Characteristics, and Human Stresses). After metric values have been generated, there are four display options to view results (e.g., Atlas-like maps, an metric index, column charts of selected metrics, and metric histograms). ATtILA runs within ArcView as an extension. It is written in Avenue, ArcView's programming language, and is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate spatial data from a variety of sources. Finally, this is a work in progress. Please report bugs and forward comments to us at ebert.donald@epa.gov or wade.timothy@epa.gov.