Daysimetric mapping of mercury emissions from contaminated sites

Abstract

In this abstract we describe the Dasymetric Mapping (DM) technique applied to mercury contaminated sites. The DM is an intelligent disaggregation procedure that incorporates ancillary data to facilitate the areal interpolation process. It differs from choropleth mapping in that areas are defined based on the actual spatial distribution of the variable being mapped, rather than administrative or other arbitrary units. The disaggregation weight was derived from soil carbon content, as it was found that increases in total mercury (and methylmercury) concentrations are related to increasing fractions of organic carbon (OC) in the soil. The DM technique was implemented in ArcGis® by creating a model that uses emissions from contaminated sites, an area-class map, and a sampling strategy set out as binary.

Keywords

• gridded emission
• contaminated soils
• soil organic carbon