Projects and Related Studies
Health and Ecological Risk Management and Evaluation System (HERMES).
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) scientists have developed a Geographic Information System (GIS) based computer decision support tool known as Health and Ecological Risk Management and Evaluation System (HERMES).
This tool provides a concise description of the current environmental landscape that can be used to evaluate the ecological and monetary trade-offs between future land use, restoration and remediation options before action is taken. Ecological impacts evaluated include effects to individual species of concern and habitat loss and fragmentation. Monetary impacts include those associated with habitat mitigation. More complex economic and ecological interactions can be easily incorporated into HERMES.
HERMES is written in ARCVIEW Avenue programming language and directly summarizes and compares ecological consequences and mitigation costs of alternative mitigation actions associated with hazardous waste sites and land uses in a visually-oriented framework. We have developed and have in-hand the framework, computer structure, and module linkages for the Windows and ARCVIEW-based structure of HERMES. We currently have in hand the necessary habitat data layers for the prototype. The prototype HERMES model has been demonstrated on ARCINFO vector-based data layers from the Biological Resource Management Program (BRMAP) at the Hanford Site in eastern Washington state; however, all that is really needed to run HERMES for a different location is GIS data layers describing the region of interest. Key data include ground cover and habitat types, locations of species of concern (threatened, endangered, or candidates for listing).
Project contact: Michael Scott