San Joaquin Valley - Agricultural Land Quality/Water Stress Combination (Final 2018)

By themselves, the findings about the quantitative profile and spatial distribution of agricultural land and water resources shed light on the value, importance, and stress on those resources in the Valley. But when the land quality and water stress findings are combined an even more interesting and useful perspective emerges. By dividing the Valley’s agricultural acreage into nine separate categories, representing all the possible combinations of land quality and water stress level in our logic model, we obtained a much more refined picture of its resources.

Logic models produce intermediate and final maps on a “fuzzy scale” from -1 (completely false) to +1 (completely true). The range of continuous values for cells can be represented and organized in multiple ways using GIS binning such as natural breaks, geometric interval and others. In order to help identify areas into classes we used a natural jenks algorithm to sort the data based into 3 groups. The value for each of the classes is shown in the attached appendix.