St. Charles County, Missouri has a history of severe property damages from flooding. The University of Missouri Extension and Greenway Network, Inc. funded the Center for Agricultural, Resource and Environmental Systems (CARES) to develop a comprehensive geographic information system (GIS) database for St. Charles County. The database is being used by different groups in the county to improve their understanding of the county's natural resource base and their ability to manage the floodplain.
The objective of this project is to develop a user-friendly spatial decision support system which local groups in St. Charles County, Missouri can use to access and analyze the database, and evaluate the potential economic and environmental impacts of alternative floodplain management schemes.
A decision support tool is developed to access a comprehensive GIS database for St. Charles county, Missouri. The county database consist of socio-economic, environmental/physical, and county zoning information. Socio-economic data are extracted from 1990 census and are represented at the block-group level, including population, race, age, income, education, employment, etc. Environmental/physical data are collected from various sources. The data include a wide range of geographical information such as municipal boundaries, school districts, land use, soils, hypsography, flood plain and others. Zoning information is developed through digitizing from St. Charles county zoning maps.
The customized interface transparently provides graphic user interfaces (GUIs) for data viewing and analyzing respectively. The "viewing" GUI allows user to access any data group desired through menus, but disables the user from saving changes to the database. However, a user can overlay any number of data layers for thematic mapping by simply clicking a button. In the process, the tool automatically takes the user to the "analyzing" GUI. In addition, the "analyzing" GUI allows the user to conduct radius analysis and multiple theme intersection, edit theme polygons and lines, and save results to the project. This customized tool is facilitated with ArcView 3.0 software, using Avenue programming language.
The customized interface allows users to view and analyze county-level data in a user-friendly format. It can serve as a template for other counties and communities. The tool will be used by the St. Charles library system, the county planning and zoning department, and local citizens.
Zhou, Yan, Chris Fulcher and Tony Prato. A Customized ArcView Tool for County-Level Data Access and Analysis. Second Annual State of Missouri GIS Conference, Jefferson City, Missouri, March 10-11, 1997.
Principal Investigators: Chris Fulcher and Tony Prato
Project Manager: Yan Z. Barnett
Funding Amount: $35,000
Funding Source: The McKnight Foundation
Project Duration: October 1995 - March 1997
130 Mumford Hall, Columbia, MO 65211Tel: 573.882.7458 | Fax: 573.884.2199 Division of Applied Social Sciences College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources © 2009-2011 by Center for Applied Research and Environmental Systems
