Each Virginia locality was assigned to one of three physiographic provinces: coastal plain, piedmont or mountain (Figure 1). The mountain province (the terminology chosen for this study) is also commonly referred to as "ridge and valley," or divided into the Blue Ridge and Appalachian provinces. A few counties were bisected by the geologic boundaries between provinces. In these cases, the counties were assigned to a single province since it would be necessary to maintain political boundaries for regulatory and advisory purposes. The criterion for placement in a province was based on landscape position. Counties sharing relatively equal areas of piedmont and coastal plain geology (Greensville, Chesterfield and Spotsylvania) were placed in the coastal plain if any part of the county bordered tidal waters. Thus, Chesterfield and Spotsylvania counties were placed in the coastal plain and Greensville was placed in the piedmont. Counties sharing piedmont and mountain geology (Greene, Madison and Rappahannock) were placed in the province which accounted for a majority of the land area. All three questionable counties were placed in the piedmont province.

    Provincial designations resulted in 44 localities in the coastal plain, 33 localities in the piedmont, and 31 localities in the mountain province.

    Project reviews involved analyzing automated permit data supplied by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Norfolk District. The data included permit number, a gross description of the proposed project, the waterway adjacent to the proposed project, the project locality, the date the Joint Permit Application was received, amount of proposed nontidal wetland impacts, amount of permitted nontidal wetland impacts, and amount of wetlands compensation. Amounts of nontidal wetland impacts and compensation were classified according to the Cowardin system.

    The data were imported into dBase IV database management software at VIMS. The initial data set contained 858 records. Each data record represented one permit application. These records included projects applied for between August 1990 and August 1993. Thirty-seven records were removed from the initial data set because they did not contain proposed nontidal wetland impacts or were dated prior to 1991. All analyses of historical permit activities presented in this report were done using 821 records dating from January 1991 to October 1993. No permit activities were recorded from localities designated in the mountain province for 1991.

    dBase IV database management software was used for all sorting and summarization of the data.

    Eight categories of development activities (herein referred to as "activity categories") were designated to analyze nontidal wetland impacts by economic pressures. The activity categories include industrial, commercial, municipal, residential, agricultural, recreational, Virginia Department of Transportation projects, and an "other/NI" category for projects which did not fit into the other categories or projects in which the activity could not be identified. Assignment of each permit to a particular activity category was accomplished through interpretation of the project description field in the database. For projects in which an accurate activity designation was not obtainable from the database, Corps personnel provided the appropriate designations. Most projects were straightforward and easily placed into a single category. Projects which could potentially be assigned to multiple categories were placed in the grouping which represented the major developmental activity within the total project. No single projects were assigned to multiple activity categories.

    Maps were generated using ARC/Info Geographic Information System software resident on a SUN UNIX workstation linked to dBase IV software.