There are two major paradigms in geography. These are human-environment interaction and spatial analysis. Human-environment interaction is defined as how the human race interacts with the environment it is surrounded by and spatial analysis is defined as the analysis of geographical entities with spatial scale. The main goal of this thesis is to examine the role that spatial scale and resolution of digital data has on hydrologic modeling using the Chipola River Basin in Florida as the case study. This goal was achieved by (1) comparing and contrasting each data set with a summary of statistics for the DEM data, as well as the drainage line feature class, and (2) completing a drainage density evaluation of the hydrologic network.
This thesis contrasts with previous research in that previous studies did not include the use of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) dataset. This thesis includes both, the SRTM data and National Elevation Dataset (NED) data for analysis. This research contributes to literature by (1) providing a methodology for drainage density evaluations, (2) providing technical aspects of this research, (3) bridging a literature gap on the use of SRTM data in this type of analysis, (4) providing readers with the implications of spatial scale and spatial resolution on hydrological modeling, and (5) providing a well-documented case study for the Chipola River Basin.
Conclusions at the technological, theoretical, and application levels have been developed based on this research. At the technological level, GIS has proven to be a useful tool that has the capability to extract multiple parameters from a digital elevation model and create a hydrological network database out of it. At the theoretical level, this thesis has shown that some difficult parameters (e.g. stream definition threshold) exist when doing this research. Thresholds used in this research were based on EDNA standards, but the research shows the drainage density estimations may be improved if the threshold was lowered. At the application level, the researched showed that spatial resolution does play a role in how hydrologic features are modeled and instituted a well-documented case study by using the Chipola River Basin.
