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Northwest
Oregon ATtILA Background
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.
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