A Web-based browsing and spatial analysis system for regional natural resource analysis and mapping

Proper use and monitoring of our land and environmental resources for quality of life and sustainable growth considerations require that timely and accurate data on land cover and land use be regularly available. Remote sensing is an appropriate tool and NOAA's 1-km AVHRR time series imagery has proven to be an invaluable input for regional level natural resource mapping and monitoring. Many previous efforts addressing the use of satellite-derived data for land cover and land use classification have resulted in the development of useful products. However, they have seldom been widely applied due to the lack of an efficient and easy-to-use delivery mechanism. The World Wide Web has become popular as a vehicle for information distribution and client/server applications. Web GIS is rapidly evolving and adapting to advances in Internet technologies. Web GISes are predominantly designed under a “thin-client / fat-server” paradigm. This approach has several disadvantages. For example, as the number of users increases, the load on the server increases and system performance decreases. Recently the focus has been shifted towards client-side Web GIS. In this paper we present a balanced client/server Web-based spatial analysis system and evaluate its performance in a regional natural resource mapping and analysis application which utilizes biweekly AVHRR imagery and several other raster and vector geospatial datasets. We also evaluate alternative approaches and assess the pros and cons of our design and implementation.