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BEHI Description

Maps & Data

   Internet Mapping Service

   Data Download

   Static Map Library

   Data Tables

Methods/Documentation

Publications

Acknowledgements & Links

BEHI Objectives

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. Geographic data are readily available for both countries, but the data lack a structured framework and compatibility in terms of temporal and positional scale and consistent quality.

The primary objective of this initiative is to provide science data in support of Environmental Health Studies to enable scientists, public health officials, resource managers, and concerned citizens to make informed decisions. USGS geographers, biologists, hydrologists, and geologists have accomplished this by implementing a comprehensive binational environmental resource database within a geographic information system (GIS) framework. The Project Annex Six between the USGS and the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGI) provides the legal framework for public access to the best available harmonized binational geospatial datasets along the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S.-Mexico Border Geographic Information System developed by the Border Environmental Health Initiative is available as both an

Internet Map Service (http://borderhealth.cr.usgs.gov/IMS.html)

And for public download from a file transfer protocol (FTP) Web site (http://borderhealth.cr.usgs.gov/datalayers.html)

The databases and Internet map service provides a framework for researchers to examine both the occurrence and distribution of disease-causing agents in the environment and their specific exposure pathways in water, air, biota, rock, and soil. A desired outcome of this project will be an enhancement of opportunities for collaborative research with public health agencies and biomedical researchers as a result of the identification of information gaps.

The second objective of this initiative is to examine and analyze linkages between human and environmental health through collaborative opportunities with natural resource scientists, managers, and public health officials among others. The USGS is actively seeking to develop partnerships along the US-Mexico border to further develop spatial products and use existing spatial data to understand the sources, distribution, and exposure pathways of environmental stressors and diseases. Some of the intended outcomes of these research efforts are to characterize unhealthy environments, provide information on how degraded environments affect the health of humans and wildlife at the landscape and population levels, and better understand the nexus among environment, wildlife, and human activities as those interactions contribute to overall environmental health.