Modeling lake conductivity in the contiguous United States using spatial indexing for big spatial data

Conductivity is an important indicator of the health of aquatic ecosystems. We model large amounts of lake conductivity data collected as part of the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s National Lakes Assessment using spatial indexing, a flexible and efficient approach to fitting spatial statistical models to big data sets. Spatial indexing is capable of accommodating various spatial covariance structures as well as features like random effects, geometric anisotropy, partition factors, and non-Euclidean topologies. We use spatial indexing to compare lake conductivity models and show that calcium oxide rock content, crop production, human development, precipitation, and temperature are strongly related to lake conductivity. We use this model to predict lake conductivity at hundreds of thousands of lakes distributed throughout the contiguous United States. We find that lake conductivity models fit using spatial indexing are nearly identical to lake conductivity models fit using traditional methods but are nearly 50 times faster (sample size 3,311). Spatial indexing is readily available in the spmodel R package.