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Mapping Arsenic in Groundwater |
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Why
was the map created?
What
data underlie the map?
How
was the map made?
No
single, perfect map
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Since May 2000, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has published
three maps summarizing a national data set on arsenic in groundwater.
These maps were intended as a big-picture view of patterns in naturally
occurring arsenic across the United States. But interest in using
these maps for other purposes – making cost-benefit estimates
for new drinking-water regulations or predicting arsenic-related
health risks for different regions of the country - has been intense.
Such demand is not unusual given current interest in making policy
decisions based on science. But doing so often requires that we
ask broad-brush political, economic and public health questions
of natural resource data collected for highly specific research
purposes. Sometimes we simply don't have the right kind of data
to answer all of the questions; other times, the problem is to
communicate the data in the right form.
This conundrum is particularly true for maps. Before trying to
answer many different questions with one map, we should consider
three "user beware" issues germane to any map of data.
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Why was the map created? |
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The ongoing process
of revising the Federal limit for arsenic in drinking water is a classic
example of a tangle of interrelated questions and data open to many
interpretations. Widespread, high concentrations of arsenic in groundwater
are generally attributed to natural sources. National regulatory and
legislative bodies need to know which parts of the country have high
arsenic in drinking water; how serious an effect arsenic may have
on public health; and where reducing arsenic concentrations will be
most costly. Maps of existing water-quality data can clarify these
issues, but creating the right map is not simple.If the question is,
"Where are the most people exposed to arsenic?" the resulting
map might point to areas of dense population relying on large public
water supply systems. To answer, "Where are people exposed to
the highest levels of arsenic?" a map might finger rural areas
where private wells containing high arsenic concentrations commonly
go untreated. A map answering, "Where will reducing arsenic be
most costly?" could identify areas with the greatest number of
wells high in arsenic; or where high arsenic occurs with high sulfate;
or where drilling new wells may be required. These different "treatment
cost" maps may not point to the same areas that other maps highlight
to show the "most population" and "highest arsenic."
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What data underlie the map? |
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Two primary data sources provide information on arsenic in drinking
water for the United States. Compliance monitoring programs are
the first source. Public water supply systems are required to monitor
for compliance with legal water-quality standards. The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) has compiled a data set of arsenic measurements
from 20,000 monitoring programs in 25 states. Leaving aside issues
of data comparability, this data set provides an important basis
for estimating how many public supply systems have high concentrations
of arsenic, or what proportion of the urban population drinks from
high-arsenic public systems.
However, no analysis of this data set can answer a slightly different
question: Where in the country are the most people at risk from
arsenic? The EPA data set contains no explicit information on the
rural population that doesn't use the public supply. More than
99 percent of this population relies on groundwater for drinking
water. Because private wells are unregulated, no national regulatory
database exists to fill this gap.
The other data source is environmental research programs. The
USGS has compiled a data set of arsenic measurements from 31,000
wells and springs in 49 states. Scientists with the USGS and state
agencies collected and analyzed these data mainly from private,
domestic wells, as well as monitoring wells and public supply wells.
These samples were collected for studies on the quality of the
country's potable groundwater resources, also called source water
or raw water. Like the EPA numbers, these measurements cannot stand
alone as the only source of data on arsenic in drinking water.
These groundwater samples may accurately represent the drinking
water used by rural homeowners and small suburbs, but may not represent
urban public supply systems' water if the utility mixes groundwater
with surface water before delivering it to consumers.
Clearly, a map using just one of these data sets can answer only
a limited set of questions. Combining the two data sets could provide
a view of where arsenic is high in both public water systems and
private wells, but still wouldn't give a complete picture of health
risks. Lifestyle, genetic and environmental factors make certain
members of the population more susceptible to health effects from
drinking high-arsenic water. In addition, such factors may have
geographic patterns that could complicate the analysis of relationships
between arsenic in drinking water and health effects. For example,
smoking rates vary geographically across the country, and arsenic
may not be the only contaminant occurring in a region's drinking
water.
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How was the map made? |
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Even given a well-defined question and an appropriate data set,
the visual and statistical techniques used to summarize data can
make a great difference to interpretation. Often, interpreting
the data requires extrapolating from discrete points to larger
areas.
Figures 1, 2 and 3 show three approaches to the question, "What
percentage of private wells in various regions have high arsenic
concentrations?" These figures use only the environmental-research
data.
Figure 1 is a point map. This is the most common way to show raw
data, but interpreting point maps is not straightforward. The human
eye is not good at estimating the proportion of high vs. low values
in an area, and point maps exacerbate this difficulty. Wells that
are close together are drawn on top of each other. The higher concentrations,
indicated by red triangles, are drawn on top of the moderate concentrations,
which in turn cover up the lowest concentrations.
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Figure 1 is a point-map that shows
locations and arsenic concentrations for 31,000 wells and springs
sampled between 1973 and 2000 (updated from Welch et al., 2000). |
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This hierarchical overplotting may exaggerate the frequency of
high values. Thus in Figure 1, the areas marked A appear to have
more high values than the nearby areas marked B.
The approach taken in Figure 2 is to illustrate proportions by
area, rather than raw data. The most common summary statistic used
for this kind of map is an average concentration per region. In
this case, the arsenic data set has a statistically skewed distribution
with a few very high values, so the average concentration of arsenic
would be biased high instead of representing the true center of
the data. Presenting percentiles of concentration, such as the
median (50th percentile), avoids this bias. Figure 2 presents the
75th percentile of arsenic concentration per county, which supports
such statements as "75 percent of wells sampled in County
X had arsenic concentrations below 10 ug/L," or, "25
percent had arsenic concentrations of at least 10 ug/L." (Note
that proportions were only computed for counties with at least
five wells.)
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Figure 2 is a county-based map
showing the 75th percentile of arsenic concentration, computed
from the 31,000 samples shown in Figure 1(updated from Welch
et al., 2000). |
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This approach makes it easy to compare two regions and determine
which counties have similar proportions of wells with high arsenic
concentrations. Thus, Figure 2 shows that A areas and nearby B
areas actually have similar proportions of high values. At the
same time, Figure 1 and Figure 2 both show that counties in area
D have proportionally more high values than counties in area C.
In this case, comparing regions is possible using either type of
map. However, Figure 2 shows that area C has a much lower proportion
of high values than might be guessed from Figure 1; the difference
between areas C and D is understated in Figure 1.
County-level arsenic summaries can link to existing county-scale
health databases and population statistics. Unfortunately, the
boundaries of counties and other sociopolitical mapping units don't
necessarily fit natural phenomena or available data. Groundwater
flow systems don't stop at county boundaries. Counties also vary
in size and shape. Five water samples may tell something about
a 350-square-mile county in the Northeast, but be inadequate for
a 20,000-square-mile county in the West: the data densities are
unequal. For example, Figure 1 shows relatively sparse data in
areas E (central Nevada) and F (Alaska, not shown to scale); but
any statistic computed from those few data points gets applied
to an enormous area in Figure 2 due to the huge size of counties
in these states. Computing proportions is helpful, but to compare
regions of such unequal sizes remains difficult.
One way to solve the problem of varying region sizes is to impose
an equal-area grid on the data. Grids can be many shapes. Figure
3 uses equal-area hexagons 100 kilometers across - the median size
of a U.S. county. Like Figure 2, the 75th percentile of arsenic
concentration was computed only for hexagons with a minimum data
density of five wells per hexagon. To improve on Figure 2, Figure
3 shows a moving 75th percentile that has been"smoothed" across
hexagon boundaries based on neighboring values. Using equal-area
hexagons makes the data densities more comparable among regions,
and the smoothing prevents the artificial "jumps" in
concentration that occur between counties in Figure 2.
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Figure 3 is a data-density-based
map showing a moving 75th percentile of arsenic concentration,
computed from the 31,000 samples shown in Figure 1. View
this map in the Map Maker.
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Examining each area's
appearance on all three figures, Figure 3 answers such questions
as, "Where in the country might at least 25 percent of wells
have high arsenic?" more precisely than would Figure 1 or
2. However, improving the mapping technique to better fit the question
comes with an important trade-off. In discarding county boundaries,
some functionality is lost: Figure 3 is more difficult to directly
relate to county-based population and health statistics than is
Figure 2. |
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No single, perfect map |
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Any single map
that attempts to summarize an entire national data set is necessarily
a limited view. Each arsenic map the USGS released in 2000 provides
a big-picture view, but a closer look at any smaller geographic
area quickly finds exceptions to national patterns. Areas of
southern California have high arsenic in groundwater, but the
city of Los Angeles relies primarily on surface water. In Minnesota,
the data set includes arsenic measurements from many different
aquifer systems, and this map ignores these differences. In New
England, most of the arsenic data shown are from bedrock aquifers
used by private wells. This dataset does not account for glacial
aquifers used by public water supplies.
National-scale maps serve an educational purpose and stimulate
discussion, but are not well suited to local planning. As with
many generalizations, these maps are better at starting debates
than ending them.
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Adapted from Ryker,
Sarah, November 2001, Mapping
Arsenic in Groundwater: Geotimes. |
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