GIS Modeling

Members of the EBTJV assessment team, specifically Teresa Thieling, graduate student with James Madison University, and Eric Smith, with Virginia Tech, performed various GIS analyses with the assessment data to determine correlations between brook trout populations and different threats and land uses.  Teresa Thieling conducted a master's thesis using the population status data with a variety of subwatershed metrics derived from satellite imagery and other GIS datasets to develop numerous predictive models.  The purpose of the models was to predict subwatershed status for the subwatersheds where brook trout status was either unknown or only qualitative data were available, and to determine metric thresholds to aid brook trout conservation efforts.  The GIS modeling indicated thresholds of several metrics that have strong correlations to brook trout presence/absence within a subwatershed.  View the thesis on predictive GIS modeling.