Automating regional descriptive statistic computations for environmental modeling

A GIS toolset was developed to support the extraction of a variety of input variables for environmental models. The developed toolset allows the automated processing of large amounts of raster data over polygon data. A case study was performed in a region centered on eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. Using the developed GIS toolset, topographic, geologic, and climatic characteristics for watersheds corresponding to 35 United States Geological Survey streamflow gauging sites were derived by processing approximately 1500 raster datasets. The developed GIS toolset greatly reduced the time and effort needed to process the GIS data, and provides a useful tool for a wide variety of environmental applications. The developed toolset is freely available for download, and a tutorial has been created. r 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.