Environmental impact assessment (EIA), and particularly cumulative
effects assessment (CEA), typically requires the analysis of large
complex data sets involving multiple actions, environmental
resources and their selected indicators, and impact-causing factors
associated with the spatial and temporal distribution of the actions. A
potentially useful tool in CEA is geographic information systems (GIS),
because such systems have the ability to store, manipulate, analyze
and display large sets of complex, geographically referenced data and
are therefore well suited to spatial applications of this nature and
complexity (Warner and Diab, 2002).