The Listing of Fish and Wildlife Advisories
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Office of Science and Technology
Document No. 823-B-97-008
The Listing of Fish and Wildlife Advisories (LFWA) is a Microsoft Windows program
that includes a wide range of reporting arid mapping capabilities. Some of these
capabilities include:
Flexible searches and queries. You can select advisories by any
combination of State or Province, EPA Region (or Canada), Advisory Type,
Pollutant, Species, Affected Population, Status (active or rescinded), and
Issuer. An example would be "ail PCB advisories in EPA Region 5 issued
by the Federal Government". By default, ail Active advisories are selected
unless otherwise specified.
A variety of reports, listing all advisories or just the advisories that meet
your search criteria. These reports include a summary report, reports of the
percentage of the size of each State's lakes and rivers under advisory,
assessed for advisory and the relative increase or decrease from the
previous year in numbers and the size of advisories by State. A report
listing the method used to establish an advisory, contact, and phone number
by State is also included.
On-screen maps showing the traces or counts of ail advisories or only your
selected advisories. These maps can be produced on an International,
National, EPA Regional, or State or Province-wide basis. You can zoom
down to particular areas, click on individual advisories to get detailed
information, and even overlay different searches In color. The maps can be
printed to a file or to your printer, with your own titles. Note that about 9% of
active advisories in North America have not been georeferenced, due to
lack of positive locational information.
Installation
The LFWA requires a PC running Microsoft Windows 3.1 or later, a minimum of 8
MB of RAM (16 MB recommended), and approximately 30 MB of disk space.
To Install the Program under Windows 3.1 (from floppy diskettes):
1.	Place the diskette labeled Diskl -Setup in drive A: (or B:).
2.	Start Microsoft Windows 3.1.
3.	In the Program Manager, click on file, and then Run.
4.	Type "A:setup" (or "B:setup") without the quotes, in the command box.
5.	Click the OK button and follow the instructions on the screen.
To Install under Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 or later:
1.	Click the Start button, then Run.
2.	Type a:setup in the Open edit box, and then click OK.
3.	Follow the instructions on the screen.

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Once the installation process is complete, you are ready to run the program:
1.	Start Microsoft Windows 3.11 or earlier (not necessary in Windows 95).
2.	Double click on the NALFWA icon (select from Start/Programs in
Windows 95).
3.	That's it! You are now in the LFWA.
Printer Hints
The Listing uses the Windows printer drivers for printing maps and reports. The
maps can be printed in color if you have a color printer set up in your Windows Print
Manager. You may also select map orientation using the Print Manager.
Quick Tutorial
To get a feei for the Listing, try the following sequence. We will examine active (as of
December, 1996) Mercury advisories in the U.S. The results of this quick tutorial will
be maps showing the location of Mercury advisories and counts of Mercury
advisories by State, and a full report of the associated data.
Steo 1; Querying
On the main menu, click Search, and then By Parameter. This brings up all
of the search criteria available. Under Select Pollutant, use the scroll bars
to locate "Mercury". Click Mercury with the left mouse button. Mercury
should now be highlighted. (By default, only active Mercury advisories will
be selected. Click Rescinded in the Status box to select those advisories.)
At the bottom of the window; click the View Data button. The first 250
records for all active mercury advisories in the U.S will appear in
spreadsheet format. Scroll through the list, both up and down and sideways
to see the available information. Then click More to see additional data.
Close this window to return to the Search window.
Step 2: Reporting
Leave Mercury highlighted in the Select Pollutant box. Now Click the
Reports button. The buttons will change to show all of the types of available
reports. Click the Full Report button; the full report for Mercury advisories
will now be on the screen. The directional buttons let you move back and
forth through the report, view the full page (by clicking the "Magnifying
glass" icon), and send the report to the printer. Close the report window.
You may want to limit records to a particular state. In the Search window,
click on a state of interest and then the Reports and Full buttons to view.
Close the report window.
Step 3: Map of advisories
With the Select window still open, make sure that Mercury is still
highlighted. Now, click on the Map Advisories button. This action will close
the Select window, and prepare the system for mapping the selected
Mercury advisories. Since Mercury advisories span both the U.S. and
Canada, the combined map will appear with the selected advisories, In red
(by default). At this point, you may choose to display information about each
advisory, one at a time, by clicking on the trace of your choice. You may
also scroll through the advisories using the arrow icons on the speedbar.

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Step 4: Mao Overlays
At this point, you may wish to add, say, PCB advisories to your map of
Mercury advisories. You can do this by selecting Search/By Parameter
option from the main menu again, and highlighting PCBs from the Pollutant
list. Now click the Map Overlay button. Then select Options/Colons/
Selected Advisories from the menu and change the color from red to green
(or any available color other than red). Finally, click the Pencil icon on the
speedbar. This will map the nationwide PCB advisories, In green, on top of
your Mercury advisories. Note that any Mercury and PCB advisories that
overlap will be green.
Steo 5: Map of Advisory Counts
Now we will make a map showing counts of active Mercury advisories by
State. Select Search/by Parameter from the main menu. Highlight Mercury
from the pollutant list as before. Click on the Map Counts button, and a new
map showing counts by State will now be drawn. You can move back and
forth between your maps by selecting Window, then the name of the
window to view, or by just clicking on the window.
This completes our brief tutorial. To exit the Listing, select File/Exit, or double click
the "slash" in the upper left corner of the window button (the Listing icon in the
upper left comer or the X icon in the upper right comer in Windows 95).
Main Menu
The Listing follows standard Windows protocols for user interfaces. The entire
system is run using mouse "point and click" options.
File has one option, Exit Exit will immediately end your Listing session.
Search opens the mapping and reporting capabilities of the Listing. There are
two options: Search By Parameter and By Advisory Name. For
example, if you want to examine Mercury advisories nationwide, select
Search/By Advisory. When the Search window appears, go down the
State list and select "United States". Then Click on "Mercury" from the
pollutant list. Your selection is highlighted on the screen. To deselect
something, just click on it again. You can click on more than one item in
a list. For instance you may want to group the pollutants "DDD", "DDE",
and "DDT' in one query; simply click on all three pollutants. If you do not
click anything, all advisories will be selected. You may also select
parameters in any combination from the other lists. Click on View Data to
display all advisories meeting your criteria. Map Advisories prepares a
map of selected advisories in red by default. Map Counts will show the
number of advisories meeting the criteria by State and Province. Map
Overlay is useful when you want to show the results of more than one
query on a map, such as Mercury and PCB advisories nationwide.

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The Reports button provides tabular access to your data, based on your
selected parameters. When you select a report, it will be displayed on
screen to view. You can print it by selecting the printer icon. By
Advisory, the other Search menu option, displays an alphabetical,
incrementally searchable list of all advisories. You can search through
this list by typing the first few characters of the advisory name. After
selecting advisories, you can view the data or map them.
Options controls the map display, including the type of map to display (advisory
traces or counts). You can choose to Draw All or just the Selected
advisories, display latitude/longitude coordinates, Overlay Cities on the
map, what Colors to use on the maps, and whether or not to display the
status bar at the bottom of the screen. Simply point and click on your
desired choices.
Maps generates color maps on the screen. You can select the entire U.S., an
EPA Region, or a specific State/Province map. These maps will include
all of the advisories for the selected geographical unit. Search can then
be used to overlay selected advisories on these maps if you desire. The
Options settings control what initially displays on the map. The map
window consists of a viewing area and a speedbar. On the map area,
the left mouse button can be used to select an individual advisory; you
may have to try a couple of times to get the mouse right on the advisory,
especially for smaller traces. When you have successfully clicked the
advisory, the data for that advisory will appear. The right mouse button
places a "zoom" box on the screen, centered on the mouse cursor. The
speedbar buttons can be used to Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom box
smaller, Zoom box larger, Next, Previous advisory, Note selection
criteria, Draw the overlay map, Draw the Canadian rivers Layer (new for
1996), Print the visible map, and Close the map window. Note that the
"zoom" features will not work if there is more than one map window open
in your Listing session.
Window is used when you have more than one map open in a session. You can
select which map to view when more than one map has been created by
selecting its name from the drop down menu. You can also choose to
Tile, Cascade, or Arrange Icons for your maps..
Help is available from the menu, and is also context-sensitive. This means
that you can get help from wherever you are in the program by pressing
F1, and the help will be related to your current activity! The Help menu is
divided into Contents, Search for Help On, which displays an
incrementally searchable list of keywords, Help on Help, which provides
help for whatever Windows version is installed on your machine, and
About the Listing, which provides brief information on the system,
including points of contact, available system resources remaining, the
EXE file creation date, and the version number of the program.

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