Special Issue
[PE&RS November 1998 Table of Contents]
The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the establishment of the Border Environmental Cooperation Commission (BECC) has directed greater attention to environmental and social-economic conditions in the United States-Mexico interface and to the necessity of a binational, transbor-der approach in addressing problems. Consequently, the border region is the location of numerous data collection and research activities. A prime example is the research being conducted under the direction of the Southwest Center for Environmental Research and Policy, a consortium of border universities, five in the United States and four in Mexico. Some of these initiatives recognize that most physical and human phenomena extend uninterrupted across the border and thus cannot be fully understood if their examination is limited to one side of the border. Many of these studies are inherently spatial and increasingly involve the use of GIS, remote sensing, and other geospatial technologies for collecting and analyzing data. Because of its integrative nature, GIS is ideally suited for spatial problem solving in the border region where data must be compiled across administrative, physical, and cultural boundaries.
The articles contained in this special issue on the United States-Mexico border illustrate some of the diversity of applied geographic information science research currently underway in this region. With the first essay by Paul Ganster, Director of the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias at San Diego State University, provides the reader with an historical overview emphasizing cross-border asymmetries, major issues in the region, and the trend toward greater interdependence between the two countries.
A significant contributor to increased cooperation is the Border XXI Framework Program carried out by nine binational workgroups, one of which is the environmental information resources workgroup and its GIS subcommittee. As noted in 1992, the need for a uniform GIS for the border region has long been recognized by university researchers and government representatives. This vision moved a step closer to reality in 1996 when the United States and Mexico agreed to cooperate in the generation of color infrared photography and digital orthophoto quarter quadrangles (DOQQs) for the entire length of the border. The principal government agency partners are, the United States Geologic Survey (USGS) and the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI). The DOQQs, described in the article by Ken Osborn, are now being released and will provide the base to which thematic layers, e.g. vegetation and soils, will be referenced.
Researchers working in the border region operate in a data poor situation. The scarcity of data means that traditional models requiring rich datasets must be abandoned in favor of simpler models and, in many instances, the use of more readily available surrogate data. An excellent example is the study by Obee et al of industrial air pollution in the Municipality of Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. This project estimates industrial air pollution using the Industrial Pollution Projection Systems (IPPS) model which involves size and type of industry as inputs. A GIS is then employed to integrate estimated industrial air pollution with housing quality data to model residential risk from air pollution.
The Imperial and Mexicali Valleys of California and Baja California are major areas of irrigated agriculture. Water pollution in the Salton Sea has reached catastrophic proportions as a result of contaminated water from urban sewage discharges and renegade flows as well as runoff from the adjoining Imperial and Mexicali agricultural areas. This contamination is derived from fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides from many diffuse sources and is carried in various forms as a part of the agricultural drainage. In this study, Finco and Hepner employ a parcel-level model to estimate sediment yield to the drainage system.
The third example of applied GIScience is the article by Congalton et al. This work demonstrates the use of remote sensing and analytic techniques to map and monitor crops and land cover in the Lower Colorado River Basin. Data on crops and other vegetation are among the inputs provided by remote sensing and GIS to the Lower Colorado River Accounting System. This model was developed by the United States Geological Survey and the United States Bureau of Reclamation as an improved method of estimating annual water consumption and its distribution among users.
The last article describes an application of gap analysis, a set of GIS techniques used widely in the United States for determining gaps in the distribution of natural habitats. This methodology has often been employed to integrate data across state boundaries, but less commonly across international boundaries such as that of the United States and Mexico. In this paper Gonzalez-Rebeles et al describe how Spectrum software is used to identify land cover types from satellite imagery for gap analysis in the Lower Colorado River area. The authors intend to combine databases from both sides of the border and produce a transnational gap analysis.
Richard D. Wright, Ph.D., is a Professor of Geography at San Diego State University. He is a specialist on GIS, cartography and geospatial database development, and has been teaching GIS for more than 15 years. He is chairman of the education committee of the University Consortium on Geographic Information Science and chairman of the board of directors of the Transboundary Resource Inventory Program. He has been a consultant to private industry and public agencies on a variety of mapping and GIS projects. Recently, he has been involved with GIS education, the use of GIS in land use modeling and sensitive lands monitoring, and transborder geospatial data integration in the United States-Mexico border region.
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