Modeling Residential Growth and Identifying Potential Biodiversity Impacts
Development of a residential growth allocation model to quantify human impacts on the environment is underway using principles of natural resource management and planning, geospatial information sciences, and statistics. A goal of this research is to develop this model using national digital datasets which are publicly available, thereby making the model highly portable. This effort utilizes Census demographic data to predict Block Groups of intensive housing unit growth. The predicted results are intersected with species richness areas defined using the National GAP Database to identify areas potentially impacted by future residential development.