Does Green Go with Gold? Environmental assessment vs. economic development in the United States

Introduction

How do the spatial distributions of environmental variables versus economic variables differ in the United States? This exercise examines economic and environmental indicators by state to determine whether there is evidence of spatial clustering of economic development using environmental assessment variables. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used to identify and remove redundancy (through correlation) in the data. The results of the PCA are then imported into ArcGIS software to interpret them.

Location

United States

Time to complete the lab

Four hours

Prerequisites

Basic understanding of principal component analysis

Moderate familiarity with using ArcGIS 10

Basic familiarity with the software package R

Data used in this lab

The data consists of values for multiple variables for each of the 50 states in the United States. Some of the variables are economic indicators, and some are environmental indicators.

USAStates: a shapefile showing all the states in the United States

• Geographic coordinate units: Decimal degrees
• Horizontal datum name: North American Datum of 1983
• Ellipsoid name: Geodetic Reference System 80

GREENGOLD_Table.csv: A comma-separated values table that includes all the variables of interest for comparing economic and environmental measures by state in the United States (Note that all the variables beginning with R are rank indicators for that attribute.)

GREENGOLD_Table.xls: A Microsoft Excel table that includes descriptions of the various economic and environmental indicators