Spatial pattern of environmental vulnerability in the Mid-Atlantic region, USA

The paper presents a comprehensive analysis to explore the environmental vulnerability pattern of the Mid-Atlantic region. It is a combination of several methods – stressor–resource overlay, state-space analysis, and clustering analysis – at different steps of the analysis. In addition, a generalized distance measure was utilized in the state-space analysis to handle the interdependency among variables without reducing their dimensionality. Results from the analysis provided valuable insights on the environmental conditions, in general, and the relative vulnerability pattern, in particular, of the Mid-Atlantic region. The suggested method offers a simple but effective way to understand the complex spatial pattern of environmental vulnerability at regional scale.