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Science for Watershed Decisions on Abandoned Mine Lands: Review of Preliminary Results, Denver, Colorado, February 4-5, 1998

The Boulder Geoenvironmental Explorer: A GIS Tool to Communicate Science to Land Managers and the Public

By A.E. McCafferty,¹ D.B. Yager,² and T.C. Sole³

The Boulder Geoenvironmental Explorer (BGE) is a prototype, PC-based viewing tool that permits visualization of the spatial relationships between diverse abandoned-mine-lands earth-science data sets for the Boulder River watershed, Montana. The prototype also includes data and interpretive products from the state geoenvironmental assessment of Montana. Information from the state-wide assessment was used in the planning process to select the Boulder River watershed for detailed study. The BGE is being utilized for a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, which is central to watershed studies. This tool provides a coherent, readily accessible database and greatly enhances the ability to recognize relations between diverse data layers. Data layers provided in the BGE include geologic, mine, cartographic, hydrologic, and biologic data as well as related interpretive geologic, geochemical, geophysical, and wetlands models from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and U.S. Forest Service. Features found in the BGE include a customized graphical-user interface developed by the USGS in cooperation with Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., unified and updatable data formats, object-oriented programming, geographic-information-system (GIS) capabilities, and accessibility from either a CD-ROM or web site. The BGE was designed to be used by nontechnical users in a shared work environment. The software will be installed on a USGS web site and used by team scientists as a data-management tool for updating data and interpretations and communicating new information between team members and cooperators. Following completion of the watershed study, a CD-ROM and a web-site application will be made available to the public for land-use planning purposes, educational use, or further scientific studies.

¹U.S. Geological Survey, MS 964, P.O. Box 25046, Denver Federal Center, Denver, CO 80225 (anne@usgs.gov)

²U.S. Geological Survey, MS 973, P.O. Box 25046, Denver Federal Center, Denver, CO 80225 (dyager@usgs.gov)

³U.S. Geological Survey, MS 973, P.O. Box 25046, Denver Federal Center, Denver, CO 80225 (tsole@usgs.gov)

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