Greenberg Michael R, Schneider Dona, Cox Louis Anthony
Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.
Cox Associates, LLC, Denver, Colorado, USA.
Risk Anal. 2025 Jul;45(7):1632-1647. doi: 10.1111/risa.17705. Epub 2025 Jan 18.
This tutorial focuses on opportunities and challenges associated with using six large, publicly accessible spatial databases published during the last decade by US federal agencies. These databases provide opportunities for researchers to risk-inform policy by comparing community asset, demographic, economic, and social data, along with anthropogenic and natural hazard data at multiple geographic scales. The opportunities for data analysis come with challenges, including data accuracy, variations in the shape and size of data cells, spatial autocorrelation, and other issues endemic to spatial datasets. If ignored, these issues can lead to misleading results. This article briefly reviews the six databases and how agencies use them. It then focuses on the data and its limitations. Examples are provided, as are summaries of the debates surrounding these databases, followed by paths forward for improving their use. We end with a checklist that users should consider when they access any of the six spatial databases or others. We believe that these new resources can be effectively used with appropriate caution to answer user-generated questions about hazards and risks-questions that are important to both community groups and government decision-makers.
本教程重点关注与使用美国联邦机构在过去十年间发布的六个大型、可公开获取的空间数据库相关的机遇与挑战。这些数据库为研究人员提供了机遇，可通过在多个地理尺度上比较社区资产、人口、经济和社会数据以及人为和自然灾害数据，为政策提供风险信息依据。数据分析的机遇伴随着挑战，包括数据准确性、数据单元形状和大小的差异、空间自相关性以及空间数据集特有的其他问题。如果忽视这些问题，可能会导致误导性结果。本文简要回顾了这六个数据库以及各机构如何使用它们。接着重点关注数据及其局限性。文中提供了示例，以及围绕这些数据库的辩论总结，随后是改进其使用的前进方向。我们最后列出了一个清单，用户在访问这六个空间数据库中的任何一个或其他数据库时都应予以考虑。我们相信，通过适当谨慎地使用这些新资源，可以有效回答用户提出的有关灾害和风险的问题——这些问题对社区团体和政府决策者都很重要。
