New Mexico Develops GIS for Environmental Concerns

The New Mexico Environment Department District III Office in Las Cruces, New Mexico, under federal grant money from the Environmental Protection Agency in Dallas, Texas, has used ArcView GIS over the last two years to develop an accurate data-corrected GIS for environmental concerns and has continued to use this database to create colorful media presentations for management and state and grant administrators.

The GIS is a powerful tracking tool for maintaining environmental and health issues in the surrounding Mesilla Valley. The office's database has more than 862 shapefiles organized in CD volumes making up databases that contain GIS points and complete road data and County parcel information provided by the Do�a Ana County GIS Department, along with key geographical locations including chemical spills, water tanks, septic tanks, air quality stations, the White Sands Missile Range, and locations of environmental hazards such as large tire piles, spray pesticides, permit violations, and dumping grounds.

ArcView GIS has allowed us to provide an amazing graphical and Web user interface for presenting data to management and for those in charge to make important decisions in resolving environmental matters. Because ArcView GIS allows us to export our views as images using the export image function, we can import these images into Macromedia Director, an animation and multimedia development program, and allow the user to feel that he or she is navigating above the maps in any direction he or she chooses. It is clear that the database organization of ArcView GIS has allowed us to provide colorful, user-friendly, and concise information within our reports of environmental problems, offering a simple way to organize the data acquired to provide graphical database solutions.

A tutorial complete with screen-captures, along with a form and procedures to standardize the database, is complete on one CD to assist in teaching the fundamentals of GIS capture, download, correction, and conversion to shapefiles. The use of Macromedia Director to fly users to specific areas and to animate the information pertinent to the environmental study being assessed has become a wonderful communication tool. Attention can also be focused on key data issues using ArcView GIS software's capabilities to sort the information in our database shapefiles quickly by key factors and see other areas affected by the changes, such as groundwater samples.

Finally, after all the data acquired each grant period is collected, it is archived and expanded into CD-ROM volumes, distributed to officials in other GIS offices around the State, and added to the main GIS database at the EPA office in Dallas for all to share and analyze the data collected.

The First Projects

One of the first projects was in Chaparral, New Mexico, where the GIS was used to assess the more than 4,000 individual mobile homes, mixed with houses, all on septic systems. This setup could prove to be serious; groundwater regularly threatens to rise to a degree where septic tanks leak into the water. The office has attained all of the pertinent data to study this entire area and has passed on data to Do�a Ana County as well as others who are now trying to analyze it and are working toward a solution.

Dairy farms have also been tracked to help give indication of pool lining effectiveness in seepage into the main water table. To help prevent such occurrences as blue baby syndrome, high nitrate levels can be easily recorded and dealt with. The same type of tracking was done for a lead mine. Flooding water from the abandoned lead mine posed a high possibility that it would contaminate the drinking water of residential areas. The office took its GPS data and was able to monitor the situation and notice changes immediately. The entire Mesilla Valley is now mapped, almost mimicking what the office would see from the satellite images, only completely digital.

The office's data is now coming into the next phase on tracking mosquito breeding sites. With the help of County Vector Control, the office hopes to have all breeding sites surrounding the City mapped and tracked. As the database grows, the office will track historical data to fix the region's environmental problems and continue to have a solid grasp on keeping the region's environment as safe and healthy as possible for the citizens living in the diverse culture of southern New Mexico. The office has not seen the west Nile virus found in the northeastern United States (see cover article), but one area south of Las Cruces, closer to the border with Texas and Mexico, has had a mosquito test positive for encephalitis, so the office is attempting to monitor these situations more closely.

The office's mosquito research will hopefully help the office better control mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases in southern New Mexico and allow the office to create yet another GIS database of its findings including chemical control methods, pesticides used, species type, mosquito biology, and areas where they are found regularly and controlled. The office's mission on this next step of acquiring vector-borne disease surveillance and location of mosquito pools is to promote tracking and research leading to more innovative methods of control.

For more information, contact Wilfred J.I. Ortiz, II (e-mail: wil@indifference.com).

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