SUBSURFACE GEOLOGY

JUSTIFICATION FOR USE:

Since the primary goal of this project was to protect the water quality and quantity within the Ichetucknee Basin we felt that one of the most important factors in our analysis should be the susceptibility of the subsurface geology to pollution/contamination from surface development. It was for this reason that we included this information layer in our analysis.

PROCESS:

This information layer, available to us in a digital format from the Florida Geographic Data Library (FGDL), contained many different pieces of information, or fields, which we could analyze or display on the computer. One of the fields contained an overall, relative ranking of the susceptibility of the subsurface geology to pollution/contamination from the surface. This field originally contained a gradient of values that ranged from 1 to 160. We reclassified all of these values into one of three categories:

1 = Least suitable for development; 2 = Intermediate suitability; or 3 = Most suitable for development.

This classification format was used for all of the different information layers that our group created and analyzed. The reclassification was done so as to maximize the relative differences in susceptibility of each area. In other words, all of the category "1" areas have similar characteristics and are significantly different from the other two categories. The same holds for each of the other two categories as well.

RESULTS:

The result of our reclassification is a map that shows the three county area with each of the resultant three classifications which we created shaded a different color. This map then became one of many different information layers that were weighted and combined to give us our Residential and Commercial Intermediate Suitability Maps.

Geology Suitablity