Local governments often struggle to balance competing demands for residential, commercial, and industrial development with imperatives to minimize environmental degradation. To effectively manage this development process on a sustainable basis, local planners and government agencies are increasingly seeking environmental information. One early step in this process is to identify local areas that are relatively environmentally sensitive and thus deserving of more intensive developmental controls.

The Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) is an example of the type of Web-based GIS screening tool that can be created to identify and prioritize local watersheds using multiple environmental criteria. The tool is also intended to assist ongoing public information and education efforts concerning watershed management and water quality issues. The Internet was chosen as a data delivery mechanism to allow public access and participation in the analysis.
A simple Web-based GIS user interface allows the user to execute the analysis by assigning relative weights to each criterion. An ESI value describing the relative environmental sensitivity of each watershed is calculated and displayed. The design and development of Web-Interface involves client server transaction wherein the client makes a request to the server and server returns the results to the client. The software tools used to create this application include ArcView GIS and Internet Map Server (ArcView IMS) technology, HTML, Java and Avenue programming.

URL: http://maps.cares.missouri.edu/analysis/esi/

For further information contact: Ramanathan Sugumaran, CARES, 130 Mumford Hall, UMC, Columbia-MO, 65211. Email: sugumaranr@missouri.edu, Tel: 573-884-3706