Geodata Crawler: A centralized national geodatabase and automated multi-scale data crawler to overcome GIS bottlenecks in data analysis workflows

Background/Question/Methods

Geodata Crawler is a GIS tool that quickly and easily tabulates GIS data quantifying landscapes associated with user-provided locations.  Geodata Crawler has two main components: a centralized national geodatabase with a variety of publicly available GIS and remote sensing products and an automated multi-scale data crawler that collects customized data at user-specified locations within the continental United States.  Geodata Crawler automatically builds project-specific geodatabases and delineates sample areas associated with each user-specified location, providing multiple spatial scales which can be easily customized to meet the needs of specific research questions.  Spatial scales currently available include:  watersheds, upstream riparian zones, local radii, local-riparian zones, local-watersheds, point locations, linear paths between sites, and stream paths between sites.  The Geodata Crawler national geodatabase currently includes data describing topography, land cover, climate, hydrology, soils, pesticide applications, roads, human populations, wildfires, and oil and gas development.  The project is constantly evolving, adding new data sets and spatial scales, to meet the needs of new applications.  Several projects, at various stages of completion, will be presented that exemplify potential applications of this new GIS tool for species distribution modeling, ecohydrology, and landscape genetics.

Results/Conclusions

The Sulphur Springs diving beetle (Heterosternuta sulphuria), a northwest Arkansas endemic, is negatively related to watershed urbanization and positively related to watershed forest cover.  A multi-scale approach showed that the effect of watershed urbanization was greatest when it occurred within 400 meters of sample sites and that this negative effect was reduced with greater percent forest cover in upstream riparian zones.  A habitat change detection tool is being developed for a managed population of the endangered American burying beetle (Nicrophorus americanus) using Geodata Crawler to automatically produce vegetation indices from Landsat imagery and to tabulate data using multiple sample radii around trap locations.  Predictive maps from this data identified at least one un-sampled region with suitable habitat and provided an economical method for monitoring habitat loss/gain.  Geodata Crawler is being used to accumulate landscape and climate data from the watersheds of USGS stream gages in an effort to model hydrologic alteration in un-gaged streams.  A project is being planned for the Bluehead Sucker (Catostomus discobolus), a sensitive fish in the Colorado River basin, to identify barriers to gene flow using microsatellite data in conjunction with Geodata Crawler landscape data collected from stream paths between sample locations.