Law Commons^™

Modeling For Management In A Compliance World, Christopher D. Dore, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

In practice, compliance-driven cultural resource “management” and its requirements for resource location, evaluation, impact assessment, and mitigation manifests a fundamentally different use of geospatial predictive modeling than do research-oriented investigations. This difference primarily results from the lack of an iterative research design. In research-oriented modeling, iterations of model building and model testing gradually build a more robust model and lead to an increased understanding of the variables that condition human spatial behavior in the past. In a compliance environment, spatial models are rarely built and evaluated; rather, once built, they are applied in a single iteration. An assumption is made …