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Continued Development of a Comprehensive Environmental Master Plan
for the Susquehanna-Lackawanna Watershed (Pennsylvania)

by the Pennsylvania GIS Consortium,
Technical Research Team, July 11,  2001)

Introduction and Overview

A comprehensive GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Watershed Plan has been initiated for the Upper Susquehanna-Lackawanna American Heritage River. Although this comprehensive GIS Watershed Plan is focused on environmental features and problems, it is expected that data acquisition and GIS decision support tools will help facilitate deployment of GIS for local government and local administrative agencies. This Watershed Plan will be a valuable resource to guide the region on numerous economic development and environmental remediation projects throughout Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

This Watershed Plan is focused on three major environmental problems in the region: abandoned mine lands, acid mine drainage, and combined storm overflows.  In addition, other related issues of land use, like agricultural runoff of sediments and nutrients or urban stormwater runoff also may be addressed to some extent to maintain a comprehensive scope to the watershed plan.  The Watershed Plan has been designed in three phases. 

The first phase involved an extensive inventory and compilation of relevant cultural and environmental data that can be integrated into a GIS and used for decision support regarding these environmental problems.  

The second phase of the GIS Watershed Plan is focused on acquisition of new GIS data that will be needed to conduct more detailed and thorough GIS watershed analyses.  More recent and more detailed (spatial resolution) GIS data and GIS decision support tools are needed to assess the AHR Watershed as a whole ecosystem and to provide sufficient technical rigor for necessary engineering design to support environmental reclamation activities. Aerial photography will be processed in digital form (for computerized mapping) to provide an important source of elevation data and cultural features needed also for modeling of stormwater, stream flow, and watershed runoff.  

The third phase will integrate these data, modeling analyses, and assessments with 700 scale GIS engineering design applications to execute environmental reclamation and ecological restoration projects at the prioritized sub-watersheds and tributary sites.  This phase will also maintain monitoring efforts in the field to update GIS analysis to track the recovery and success of reclamation activities from a comprehensive, holistic ecological watershed  approach.  

©2001 PAGIS