Table 1.
Interview classification and definitions of social vulnerability.
Fig 1.
Flow diagram indicating methodological framework and resulting measures of social vulnerability.
Gray arrows and boxes show intermediate data processing steps. Black arrows and boxes connote results.
Table 2.
Descriptions for the 25 input variables considered in the social vulnerability index (SoVI).
Adapted from [28].
Fig 2.
Tract-level social vulnerability index (SoVI) results for the Milwaukee River Basin from 1980–2010.
Inset map locates the Milwaukee River Basin in reference to Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes along the border of the USA and Canada. The upper panel show trends for the watershed with dark red indicating the highest level of social vulnerability for census tracts in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. The lower panel shows the same data within the city of Milwaukee. Data for all maps is reapportioned to 2010 census boundaries in the Geolytics Neighborhood Change database.
Table 3.
Measure used to operationalize the temporal definition of social vulnerability.
Components (C) elicited for each decade. Component names connote the attributes with theoretical links to high vulnerability. The directional effect (DE) indicates whether the initial component scores needed to be reversed so that higher values were associated with greater vulnerability. The percent of the variance in the underlying data explained by each component is also provided. Full PCA results are provided in S1 Table.
Fig 3.
Maps of measures of vulnerability over time corresponding to Table 4.
Clusters of high vulnerability for 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 appear on the far left. With persistent vulnerability, increasing vulnerability, and transient vulnerability following.
Table 4.
Descriptive table of social of vulnerability measures corresponding to maps in Fig 2.
Table 5.
Summary of measures of vulnerability developed in this paper and their uses to inform planning.