Ruth Alkons Wolinsky presents her MSENV Technical Report Defense

Abstract
Watershed modeling has emerged as an increasingly useful tool in relating water quality to specific sources of contaminants in the watershed and the mechanisms that control the dynamics of these contaminants. The United States Geological Survey’s (USGS’s) implementation of the spatially referenced regression SPARROW nutrient model explains much of the variation in nutrient concentrations in large, multi-state hydrologic units. but not without a considerable effort in database creation to support the model. This report explains the nature of these problems according to the tenets of the emerging field of Geoinformatics, including proper metadata construction, database design, benchmarks, collaboration, standards and best practices. A procedure is documented for merging and correcting errors in water-related data in the translation between two federal agencies’ databases.

Committee Members
Dr. Douglas Crawford-Brown
Dr. Marc Serre
Dr. Gerald McMahon (USGS)

For further information please contact Rebecca Riggsbee Lloyd by email at Rebecca_Lloyd@unc.edu