With this week past us, I have visited Altamont Vineyard and Winery, and Krug Farms. These are some of the pictures I have taken.

Environmental Update: Week 4-5

This week has been very informative and useful, but it has also had some unfortunate challenges that have made the work progress more slowly than I would have liked. Despite these challenges, there are some good results to post:

First, there is a new version of the project proposal that I drafted. While this is an updated version, it continues to change as the project evolves, and so I posted a live link that updates automatically. You can access that here: . This will give a detailed description of the methods being used by our team in creating the final research.

I also mapped the Cropland data, and downloaded resources to link pesticide and fertilizer use to the crops produced. This was in PDF form, so it had to be copied into excel, from where it can be joined to a map in ArcGis. I attempted to extract out the croplands within each watershed, but ArcGIS continued to have issues in processing, either incorrectly projecting or not outputting a table. Neither reprojecting the data nor building a new attribute table seemed to work, and none of the many different strategies I tried seemed to make any difference, so I got around this limitation by first changing the cropland to a vector polygon (previously it was a raster) and then clipping the data to the watershed layer boundaries. Later on I will spatially join these together with demographic data.

Pictures for all of this will be forthcoming soon.

These are some of the images I have taken. I will post a few images every week so everyone else can see what I am doing as time progresses. Posting a Google Photo Album was discussed, so I may do that as well.

Week 3: Environmental Update

This week was spent doing a lot of interesting things, First, many of the spatial characteristics in our area of interest (New York, esp. the Capital Region) were processed. I found the watershed data for the areas of interest and calculated it spatially (its tabular data, available from the USGS, can be joined to the areas of interest) and I output an intersection of the demographic data in the watershed. The photo is below:

Additionally, I calculated the rainfall statistics for each of the watersheds into average raster layers. I had some trouble getting them to output correctly, but finally they did turn out as well. They did seem to have some error in processing, as they output in a coordinate system that was not desired, but I will work on that.

The rest of the week was dedicated to writing a research proposal. After having it checked by Dr. Meierdiercks, I will put it up on the blog or the website.

Surface Water Data

There are several sources for surface water data, the most extensive being the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

• A map of all current and past USGS gaging sites is available here: http://maps.waterdata.usgs.gov/mapper/index.html
• A "current conditions" mapper is available here: http://waterwatch.usgs.gov/wqwatch/map?state=ny&pcode=00630 (you may choose both the state and water condition you are interested in)
• You can also search for sites based on the condition you are interested in: http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/uv?referred_module=sw&search_criteria=site_tp_cd&submitted_form=introduction

The sites in the Northeast with water quality data for the period we are interested in are listed here:

• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01315500&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01312000&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01358000&agency_cd=USGS
• http://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01351500&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01357500&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01364500&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=04226000&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=04249000&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01095375&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01021050&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01111230&agency_cd=USGS
• http://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01124000&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01184000&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01191000&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01193050&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01196500&agency_cd=USGS
• http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01200600&agency_cd=USGS
• http://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=01357500&agency_cd=USGS

To view the type of water quality data available for each site, click on the link for "Field/Lab water-quality samples", then scroll down close the bottom of the page, toggle "Table of data", and click "Submit". Be sure to check the dates for the data collection since some gages have long gaps in their data records.

There are also water data available from 2008 to today through the Hudson River Environmental Conditions Observing System (HRECOS): http://www.hrecos.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=143&Itemid=54

Week one of the research project is now behind us! There are some interesting updates on the Environmental Science side of the project. First of all, I was able to find some interesting journal articles and books on the analysis of rainfall and its effects on spreading pesticides throughout the environment. Also, through NOAA and NWS, I found rainfall data as points across the United States and displayed them in ArcMap, with less to more rainfall displayed as red to green, respectively;

I then found National Land Cover data for 2001-2011. It was in a raster (image) format, so to properly display the rainfall points, I had to make a raster image out of the rainfall points, displayed as the orange transparency in the lower photo:

The multicolored layer in the photo is the land cover data. In the next few weeks, I will be analyzing the changes in land cover based on rainfall characteristics.