With increased awareness about Global Warming and the risks and costs associated with fossil fuels, we are becoming more concerned about understanding and protecting our environment.

GIS is powerful tool in aiding how we view and manage our natural resources. GIS gives us the ability to combine layers of information about place so that we can see relationships, possible outcomes, trends, and use that information to make more informed decisions.

One example of this is the United States Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) EnviroMapper®.

EnviroMapper is a Web-based interactive mapping tool for viewing and querying environmental information. You can zoom in to an area, or enter a state, county, city, ZIP code, or watershed to view environmental data from EPA's Envirofacts Warehouse.

"With EnviroMapper, you have access to a wealth of environmental information on your desktop. EnviroMapper is a powerful tool used to map various types of environmental information, including air releases, drinking water, toxic releases, hazardous wastes, water discharge permits, and Superfund sites. Select a geographic area within EnviroMapper and view the different facilities that are present within that area. Create maps at the national, state, and county levels, and link them to environmental text reports. You can even insert dynamically created maps in your own Web pages. If you have a Web browser, you can use EnviroMapper."—EPA on "What is Enviromapper"

Whether you are looking to buy a home and want to know "what's nearby" or you are planning new roads in your community, you can find a wealth of environmental information, such as

  • Superfund sites
  • Drinking water
  • Toxic releases
  • Hazardous waste
  • Water discharge permits

You can also view this information in context by adding map features to your map, including major roads, railroads, churches, hospitals, schools, populated places, counties, states, streams, streets, water bodies, watersheds, rivers, and federal lands.

To learn more, check out their FAQs.

Learn about ArcIMS, the software behind the application.