Social Vulnerability in Watershed Planning - Milwaukee River Basin 1980 to 2010

The dataset supports the social vulnerability index (SoVI) in the Milwaukee River Basin (Wisconsin, USA). We downloaded data for the watershed from 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. These data came from the Neighborhood Change Database maintained by Geolytics, which apportions historical census data into 2010 boundaries. Seven of the 32 variables used by Cutter et al. [1] were not available. The loss did not alter vulnerability designations (authors, unpublished data). We performed Z-score transformations on the remaining 25 variables and completed principle components analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation. Such standardization and rescaling limits the influence of indicators with different units or ranges. Before summing PCA coefficients, each is assigned a direction so that higher scores indicate higher vulnerability.