Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
participants was developed and drawn from three sources. The first group consisted of
135 people involved in the Maumee Remedial Action Plan (RAP) partnership.
The Maumee RAP is a partnership of citizens, government agencies, businesses
and industry working to restore the health of our streams in the Maumee Area of
Concern (AOC) (
www.partnersforcleanstreams.org
). The second group consisted of
25 additional participants drawn from a list of Western Lake Erie Basin Committees
provided by NRCS. Since 1935, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (origi-
nally called the Soil Conservation Service) has provided leadership in a partnership
effort to help America's private land owners and managers conserve their soil,
water, and other natural resources (
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov
)
. The third group
consisted of 28 additional contacts identified through Ohio Watershed Network
(
http://ohiowatersheds.osu.edu/groups/
)
of watershed groups in the Western Lake
Erie Basin and through response emails from the original survey sent out providing
further contacts. The total sample group for the online survey consisted of 188
individuals from the watershed planning community in the Western Lake Erie Basin.
9.4.2 Procedure
Participants were emailed an invitation to be included in this study. The email gave
a brief overview of the purpose of the study and included the link to an online
survey through a service called SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey has a single pur-
pose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily
(
http://surveymonkey.com/
). This online service also has database capabilities,
such as storing data, exporting, summarizing, and tabulating results. After 2 weeks,
participants were emailed a reminder to fill out the survey before the close of the
study, which was scheduled in two more weeks time.
The survey asked questions in five categories: background information; current
use of GIS; spatial data resources; data distribution, data sharing and data exchange;
and future use of GIS. Background information included contact information, so to
get a sense of the sample that responded to the survey and so participants can be sent
a link to the results of the survey. Part of the background information included a
question on their current employer. It is important to know the type of participants
who are utilizing this survey and their related interests in GIS. The participants were
also asked about their watershed concerns in a ranking format.
Participants were asked about their current use of GIS including the length of time
spent using GIS, how frequent GIS is used, what GIS data is being used for, and the
software being utilized. Open ended questions explored how has GIS use benefited
their organization and what improvements would they like to see to their GIS capa-
bilities. This will allow for knowledge as to what the participants are not receiving, as
far as training, which they feel they need in order to be better users of GIS.
The next section of the survey explored their spatial data resources. The aim is to
know where the participants were gathering their data and the type of data they
used. Part of this section led the participants to an “Online GIS” viewer for the
Western Lake Erie Partnership GIS program located on a separate webpage at
