GIS application in environmental monitoring and risk assessment

Abstract

GIS techniques are becoming the mainstream tool in different disciplines such as assessments of biomass resources, mineral resource analysis, groundwater, and air quality investigation. This study explored its application in solving environmental problems monitoring and risk assessment. GIS application in environmental monitoring has mainly been divided into three aspects: water, soil, and atmosphere. Based on ArcGIS 10.1 software and ArcGIS 9.3.1 version, GIS has been applied in water supply system monitoring and soil heavy metal concentration monitoring, respectively. In addition, it can achieve real-time geographic location information transmission accurately and monitor in various fields by combining the Alibaba Cloud elastic computing service server, user management development environment, real-time data display, wireless sensor network, Arduino microcontroller, and a series of sensors. Combined with the Radial Basis Function Network model and spatial data, GIS technology could monitor and assess the degree of soil wind erosion hazard by quantifying the various indicators of soil wind erosion. GIS can also be applied to assess the environmental risks from water, land, and atmosphere. Based on geological and geomorphological data, the integration of remote sensing and GIS can complete the assessment of flash flood disasters, groundwater exploration, and groundwater pollution. By using the spatial analysis and data processing capabilities of GIS and combined with other technologies or methods such as digital elevation model and Pollution Index, topographic changes, soil properties, and heavy metal pollution can be assessed. GIS provides the ability to query spatial data and translates existing spatial patterns into measurable targets with its built-in analytical tools. It can be used to predict and assess air quality prediction. Through these approaches, relevant authorities can manage different areas rationally and targeted manner, which has practical and long-term implications.