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Arkansas Economic Atlas Project

 

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Arkansas Economic Atlas Project

 

A Web-based economic atlas created by University of Arkansas researchers gave businesses, city planners, and other interested parties a window through which to view economic indicators throughout every region of the state. The Arkansas Economic Atlas Demonstrated how geospatial technologies and emerging online GIS capabilities could be leveraged to allow companies to make educated decisions regarding the availability of key development resources when expanding into Arkansas.

In 1999, a CAST research team developed a prototype online mapping atlas of critical resources within Arkansas that have been identified as important for supporting economic development activities. This research project was supported by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) for a two year period and it provided an opportunity to demonstrate a collection of important economic development assets available within Arkansas. At that time, Arkansas did not have a similar online resource and one of the many deliverables within this research was the demonstration of the usefulness of the seven framework datasets to economic development decision makers.

One for the innovative aspects of the systems was the way in which it restructured and presented "traditional" economic data. It is common for site analyses to provide information on many measures of economic interest in an standard "enumeration" district - such as a city, county or state. Thus a report would commonly have the the number of individuals with a college education, the number of hospital beds, etc., in the given city or county. In looking at the rural areas of Arkansas, however, it became clear that these traditional measure did not accurately reflect either the potential market or resources and placed the state ar a "competitive disadvantage." This was due to the fact that, in most rural areas, prospective employees or customers will travel a considerable distance and these distances are much greater than the city or county limits. Thus, the real numbers of prospective customers, employees or other measures are much larger than given by the standard county or city-based accounting.

In developing the Arkansas Economic Atlas the states road systems were used to create "commuting" buffers around all the communities in the state with a population of 2,500 or more. These were computed for both a 30 minute and a 60 minute commute. These new areas were then used to calculate a number of standard economic indices, in addition to those calculated on the traditional cities and counties. An automated system was developed to populate standard spreadsheets with reports on the data.

The following graphics illustrate some of the capabilities of the system.

Step 1: The user can first select any one of the state's communities form a drop down list and choose a 30 or 60 minute commute buffer.

 

An example of one of the 60 minute buffers is shown in the next image

 

One of the many reports for the chosen area. A large number of different reports on various economically relevant categories could be prepared.

 

A portion of the Excell spread sheets that were automatically populated and could be downloaded.

 

This demonstration project terminated in 2003 due to lack of ongoing funding, but we worked closely with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission (ADEC), Entergy Corporation, Arkansas Geographic Information Office (AGIO), Arkansas Science & Technology Authority (ASTA) and others during this period to provide an understanding of the related technologies and dataset requirements for such online decision support.