Description

The US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment (CPHEA) Public Health & Environmental Systems Division (PHESD) is currently engaged in research aimed at developing a measure that estimates overall environmental quality at the census tract level for the United States. This work is being conducted as an effort to learn more about how various environmental factors simultaneously contribute to health disparities in low-income and minority populations, and to better estimate the total environmental and social context to which humans are exposed. This work contains the finalized Environmental Quality Index (EQI), as a single index combining variables from each of the associated domains for the 2006-2010 census tract level EQI: air, water, land, built environment, and sociodemographic environment as well as EQI for census tract stratified by Rural Urban Continuum Code (RUCA) as determined by a reclassification based off urbancity and commuting flow initially proposed in Urban-Rural Residence and the Occurrence of Cleft Lip and Cleft Palate in Texas, 1999-2003 published in Annals of Epidemiology (Messer, et al, 2010, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20006274/); RUCA initially was 10 classifications made by USDA Economic Research Service composed of: RUCA 1 Metropolitan Core Area, RUCA 2 Metropolitan High Commuting Area, RUCA 3 Metropolitan Low Commuting Area, RUCA 4 Micropolitan Area Core, RUCA 5, Micropolitan High Commuting, RUCA 6 Micropolitan Low Commuting Area, RUCA 7 Small Town Core, RUCA 8 Small Town High Commuting Area, RUCA 9 Small Town Low Commuting, RUCA 10 Rural Areas (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-commuting-area-codes/). RUCA 1 remained it's own class, RUCA 2 remained it's own class, RUCA 3, 4, 5, 6 were combined and conveyed as RUCA 3, RUCA 7, 8, 9 were combined and now conveyed as RUCA 4 and RUCA 10 became RUCA 5 in the new classification. Within the new classification RUCA 1 is Urban Core, RUCA 2 is Suburban Area, RUCA 3 is Micropolitan Area, RUCA 4 is Small Town Area and RUCA 5 is Rural Area (Messer, et al, 2010). This dataset contains the finalized variables chosen to represent the overall environment within in a single Principal Component Analysis (PCA); data sources are: EPA's CMAQ: The Community Multiscale Air Quality Modeling System (http://www.https://www.epa.gov/cmaq/), the National-Scale Air Toxics Assessment (http://www.epa.gov/nata/), the U.S. Geological Survey Estimates of Water Use in the U.S. for 2010 (https://water.usgs.gov/watuse/data/2010/), the U.S. Drought Monitor Data (http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/), “Estimated Annual Agricultural Pesticide Use for Counties of the Conterminous United States” data for pesticide use (https://www.usgs.gov/data/estimated-annual-agricultural-pesticide-use-counties-conterminous-united-states-2013-17-ver-20), CropScape (https://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape), EPA Facility Registry Service (https://www.epa.gov/frs/geospatial-data-download-service), Dun and Bradstreet North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes(http://www.dnb.com); National Land Cover Database (NCDL) (https://www.mrlc.gov/), United States Census (http://www2.census.gov) and ESRI Crime Report (https://doc.arcgis.com/en/esri-demographics/data/crime-indexes.htm).

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Name	Format	Description	Link
	0		https://downloadlink.epa.gov
	0		https://work.epa.gov/geospatial-resources/national-geospatial-support-team-ngst

USEPA Environmental Quality Index (EQI) by Census Tract for the United States, 2006-2010

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