Natural Resources Research ( 2007)
DOI: 10.1007/s11053-007-9041-x
Introduction to Special Issue on Spatial Modeling in GIS
Gary L. Raines1,3 and Graeme Bonham-Carter2
The papers in this special issue describe a variety
of applications of GIS-based spatial modeling to
problems in the geosciences. Most of the papers were
presented orally at a session of the International
Association for Mathematical Geology (IAMG)
Annual Meeting held in Toronto, August 2005
(Cheng and Bonham-Carter, 2005). That session,
chaired by Gary Raines and Graeme Bonham-Carter,
particularly focused on studies made by using the
software package Arc-SDM, and again most of the
papers here describe applications made with Arc-
SDM, which, as the name suggests, is an extension of
ESRIs ArcGIS. The objective of the Toronto session
and this special issue is to bring together a sample of
the diverse studies made with Arc-SDM. In fact there
is a growing literature of applications of Arc-SDM to
nongeological problems, such as animal habitats,
archaeology, environmental impact, medicine espe-
cially epidemiology, fire science, military science, and
others. The principal applications in the geosciences
have been to resource appraisal, landslides, and
groundwater contamination, and the papers here
illustrate some to this diversity.
The modeling methodology underlying Arc-
SDM has been around for many years, but interest
in applications has grown greatly since the devel-
opment of commercial GIS in the mid-1980s. Prior
to that time, research groups in various organiza-
tions developed standalone computer packages that
combined raster processing and multivariate statis-
tics. The SIMSAG program (Chung, 1983) was a
good example of such a system, applied mainly to
mineral-prospectivity mapping. When commercial
1
Consultant, 940 Sumac, Reno, NV 89509, USA.
2
Geological Survey of Canada, 610 Booth St, Ottawa, ON,
Canada K1A 0E8.
3
To whom correspondence should be addressed; e-mail: garyraines@
earthlink.net
GIS appeared about 1985, it became desirable to
separate the multivariate statistical analysis from the
GIS processing. At the Geological Survey of Can-
ada, a number of studies were carried out using the
SPANS GIS, coupled with FORTRAN code for
doing data analysis with weights-of-evidence, and
other methods (e.g. Bonham-Carter, Agterberg, and
Wright, 1988). Later, as the commercial GIS world
came to be dominated by ESRIs Arc-Info and
ArcGIS, it became desirable to provide spatial
modeling tools to a wider audience. Gary Raines
from the U.S. Geological Survey joined forces with
Graeme Bonham-Carter, and together they led the
development of Arc-SDM, a spatial data modeling
program written first in Avenue, a programming
language developed for ESRIs ArcView (Kemp and
others, 2001). The original version of this program
was restricted to the weights-of-evidence method,
pioneered by Frits Agterberg, Graeme Bonham-
Carter, and Danny Wright. Later versions allowed
the use of logistic regression, fuzzy logic, and neural
network analysis. Then ESRI developed a new ver-
sion of ArcGIS that used Visual Basic and the
Avenue program had to be rewritten (Sawatzky and
others, 2004). Finally, ESRI developed geopro-
cessing tools that simplified the language develop-
ment, and the latest version of Arc-SDM uses the
geoprocessing code (in development 2/2007).
During the last 10 years, a number of training
workshops have been held to teach spatial modeling
users how to use Arc-SDM, and the code has been
freely downloadable from the Internet. It became
apparent that there was a broad range of applica-
tions of the spatial modeling approach (whether
using Arc-SDM or not), and that a special session
might bring together a variety of users with some
common interests in the methodology.
This collection of papers could be organized
various ways. We chose to start with applications that
have lead to mineral discoveries or land-management
2007 International Association for Mathematical Geology

decisions and conclude with more academic applica-
tions. Some of the academic applications however,
have lead to discovery of new resources, so the
organization is not simple. In addition, these papers
demonstrate a diversity of map-scale applications
from 1:5,000 to 1:35,000,000. Thus the diversity of
applications all have some degree of successful
applications and demonstrate that the same meth-
odology and approach can be applied to diverse
spatial modeling problems.
The first paper by Nykanen and Ojala of the
Geological Survey of Finland (GTK) addresses the
application of a weights-of-evidence model to gold
exploration in a greenstone belt in Lapland, Finland.
This weights-of-evidence model, which incorporates
a fuzzy logic submodel for the geochemical evi-
dence, has been published previously; so this paper
addresses the critical question of testing or valida-
tion of the model in the laboratory and ultimately in
the field. The first field test of this model in a frontier
target discovered a new gold occurrence in a
previously unexplored area. Presently nine targets
defined by this model are being or being prepared
for drilling by the GTK. In addition, the release of
this model has caused an increase in exploration
activity in the greenstone belt. The GTK has geo-
physical data with a line spacing of 200 m and geo-
chemical data with a sample every 4 km2 upon
which this model was prepared. The map scale of
this model might be considered 1:20,0001:100,000.
The second paper by Arthur, Wood, Baker,
Cichon all of the Geological Survey of Florida, and
Raines of the U.S. Geological Survey utilizes
weights of evidence to model of the vulnerability of
groundwater to contamination. The primary mod-
eling reported in this paper addresses the Florida
Aquifer System, one of the three main modeled
aquifers of Florida. This paper gives a summary of
why and how the models were made. Extensive
testing of the models is reported and the acceptance
of the models as a legal document for land man-
agement and groundwater protection in Florida
indicates the acceptance of the models. The paper
also presents an interesting discussion of the public
relations or education that is necessary for the suc-
cessful application of any model in the pubic policy
arena. These models are reported to have a map
scale for application of just less than 1:100,000.
Another measure of the success of this modeling
effort is that Arthur has now been asked to prepare
larger scale models for several individual counties in
Florida.
Raines and Bonham-Carter
The modeling in Florida was stimulated origi-
nally by groundwater protection modeling done by a
group in Milan, Italy. This group has contributed the
third paper in this collection, authored by Masetti,
Poli, and Sterlacchini. This paper addresses refine-
ment of previous weights-of-evidence groundwater
modeling in Milan. This time the focus is on multi-
class generalization of categorical and ordered data
in order to define more subtle variation. Also, this
paper investigates validation methods as proposed
by Chung and Fabbri (2003). This paper is based on
1:20,000-scale data.
It is interesting to note that the groundwater
contamination models by Arthur and others and
Masetti and others both have large training sets of
contaminated wells and validation sets of uncon-
taminated wells. Both papers use these large training
sets to advantage to validate their models. This is
different from the typical situation in mineral-
exploration examples, such as Nykanen and Ojala,
where model development and validation must be
done with a low density of training points. This dif-
ference allows for different approaches to validation
documented in these papers.
Poli and Sterlacchini address this issue of the
size of the training set directly in a weights-of-evi-
dence application to predicting landslides. In this
study, the authors have data at 1:20,000 map-scale
and address the question, how to represent the
landslides by points as required by Arc-SDM. With
1:20,000-scale data, the landslides are large features
that cover diverse geology, slopes, aspects, etc.,
which are used as evidence. This paper tests various
approaches to the density of points to represent
these large landslides and finds that a conservative 1
point per 50 m provides a better answer than 1 point
per landslide and slightly better answer than 1 point
per 20 m. This is a nonstandard analysis because the
weights-of-evidence statistics are inflated by
increasing density of points. This paper uses various
validation approaches to support its conclusions.
The fifth paper by Robinson and Larkins of the
U.S. Geological Survey uses weights-of-evidence
and logistic regression to model the activity of peo-
ple. Using 1:500,000-scale geologic maps and re-
gional transportation and population data, these
authors modeled the probability of obtaining a
permit for an aggregate production site. Their
training sites are records of permits, including cur-
rent permits and renewal of permits that are re-
quired to open an aggregate production facility.
Thus, they use geology to define the aggregate
Introduction to Special Issue on Spatial Modeling in GIS
resource and the transportation facilities to address
this critical economic issue in development of an
aggregate site. Then they use population density to
address the not in my backyard issue of where the dom about the meaning of map scale.
public will allow a site to be developed and where
there is demand for aggregate.
The next two papers address the emerging
applications of neural networks to spatial problems.
The applications of neural networks offer the
opportunity of addressing yet ill-defined nonlinear
processes or problems for which there is little
understanding of the physical process being mod-
eled. Behnia of the Geological Survey of Iran uses
the radial basis function link net of Arc-SDM to
address a classical mineral exploration problem.
Tissari, Nykanen, Lerssi, and Kolehmainen of the
University of Kuopio, Finland, and Geological Sur-
vey of Finland, utilize the large-scale geophysical
data of Finland with the radial basis function link net
to compute the surfical geology. Behnias model is
1:100,000 map-scale and Tissari and others is a
1:20,000 map-scale model. Both of these stimulating
papers demonstrate a significant degree of success
that suggests useful applications and refinements of
these neural net tools.
In the next paper, Nelson (Colorado School of
Mines), Connors (Geologic Data Systems), and Su-
arez S. (CODELCO) present the largest map-scale
model (1:5,000) in this collection. This paper pre-
sents an extensive data-exploration effort to predict
slope failure in the Chuquicamata open pit copper
mine, Chile. As with any modeling effort, there are
many approaches to the desired goals. These include
various ways to prepare the data for use in modeling
and choices of what and how to use the data in the
model. The authors present a detailed explanation
of ways to utilize the extensive data available in this
active mine. Their models are being used by the
mining staff and successfully predicted subsequent
mine-wall failures.
The next paper by Raines (U.S. Geological
Survey), Connor (Geologic Data Systems), and
Chorlton (Geological Survey of Canada) presents
the smallest scale analysis, 1:35,000,000. The models
presented in this paper use 1:10,000,000 and
1:35,000,000 geologic maps of the world in a weights-
of-evidence analysis of the consequence of map
scale on predicting global porphyry tracts. The two
models each derived from a separate geologic map
were validated by comparison with the 1:1,000,000-
scale USGS mineral assessment of the United
States. In this analysis, it is impossible to separate
the conceptual framework of the map from the map
scale, but the smallest scale map correlated best with
USGS assessment, contradicting conventional wis-
The final paper is by Coolbaugh (University of
Nevada, Reno), Raines (U.S. Geological Survey),
and Zelner (University of Nevada, Reno). It dem-
onstrates the weights-of-evidence based approach to
computing the number of undiscovered geothermal
systems in the Great Basin. Starting with a conven-
tional weights-of-evidence model of the geothermal
resources based on known geothermal wells, the
authors present a fuzzy-logic model of the degree of
exploration. Then the mathematics are presented to
refine the weights and the posterior probability to
remove the exploration bias based on the degree-of-
exploration map. Using this new approach, an esti-
mate of the undiscovered resource is presented.
Validation of this estimate is addressed, as with the
Nykanen and Ojala paper, by reporting on three
new discoveries based on and consistent with the
models.
Based on these ten papers, it can be seen that
successful models are being developed for diverse
processes. Map scale is not a limiting factor. Clearly,
the scale of the data determines the scale of the
models or the scale of the process that can be
modeled with the same mathematical, GIS tools. As
shown by Robinson and Larkins, it is even possible
to model the complex decision processes of people.
As shown by all of these models it is possible to
document all of the decisions in a modeling process,
so the results are reproducible. As discussed by
Arthur and others, it is critical to educate the users
of the model about the limitations of and specific
questions addressed by the model.
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 Raines and Bonham-Carter

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