The Role of Spatial Autocorrelation in Prioritizing Sites Within a Geographic Landscape.

Superfund program legislation–primarily the U.S. Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act–and its public health motivations catapulted environmental contamination issues into the forefront of society΄s concerns. One outcome was a report by the U.S. National Research Council (NRC, 1994) examining principal methods considered or actually employed by federal and state government agencies to prioritize the remediation of hazardous waste sites. The emphasis was on between-site variation among locations, initially overlooking within-site variation for locations. The purpose of this paper is to extend more recent work on prioritizing the remediation of subregions within a given hazardous waste site, emphasizing within-site variation for locations. These extensions are illustrated with a case study of the Murray superfund site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]