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Delineation of estuarine management areas using multivariate geostatistics: the case of Sado Estuary
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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The Sado Estuary is a coastal zone located in the south
of Portugal where conflicts between conservation and
development exist because of its location near industrialized
urban zones and its designation as a natural reserve.
The aim of this paper is to evaluate a set of multivariate
geostatistical approaches to delineate spatially contiguous
regions of sediment structure for Sado Estuary. These
areas will be the supporting infrastructure of an environmental
management system for this estuary. The boundaries of
each homogeneous area were derived from three sediment
characterization attributes through three different
approaches: (1) cluster analysis of dissimilarity matrix
function of geographical separation followed by indicator
kriging of the cluster data, (2) discriminant analysis of
kriged values of the three sediment attributes, and (3) a
combination of methods 1 and 2. Final maximum likelihood
classification was integrated into a geographical information
system. All methods generated fairly spatially contiguous
management areas that reproduce well the environment
of the estuary. Map comparison techniques based on
κ statistics showed that the resultant three maps are similar,
supporting the choice of any of the methods as appropriate
for management of the Sado Estuary. However, the
results of method 1 seem to be in better agreement with
estuary behavior, assessment of contamination sources, and
previous work conducted at this site.