This dataset was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Border Environmental Health Initiative (<http://borderhealth.cr.usgs.gov/index.html>). International borders politically divide the landscape but rarely represent barriers for environmental issues. The major issues surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border involve economics and population growth that present challenges to environmental management and natural resource planning. To monitor trends and analyze the stresses to the environment, binationally integrated baseline datasets that portray the status of the landscape are needed. The primary objective of this project is to develop integrated, environmental resource and human health datasets for display and further analysis within a geographic information system (GIS) framework.
Datasets created for the Border Environmental Health Initiative (BEHI) follow watershed boundaries as defined by Woodward and Durall (1996). As part of the U.S.-Mexico Border Field Coordinating Committee Issues Team, Woodward and Durall used surface-water drainage basins as the primary basis for defining and delineating the extent of the border area from a shared-water resources perspective. In order to provide integrated datasets in the border region, local and regional BEHI datasets have been clipped to this boundary.