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DEVELOPMENT OF A MID-ATLANTIC LAND USE/ LAND COVER CHANGE DATA SET (1970S TO 1990S)
Citation:
Edmonds, C M., D T. Heggem, A C. Neale, R D. Lopez, AND K B. Jones. DEVELOPMENT OF A MID-ATLANTIC LAND USE/ LAND COVER CHANGE DATA SET (1970S TO 1990S). Presented at 11th Australasian Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry, Brisbane, Australia, September 2-6, 2002.
Impact/Purpose:
The primary objectives of this research are to:
- Provide information on the variability in water supply that can be expected under varying climatic conditions. Early efforts will be focused on assembling regional databases for at least two counties (Mecklenberg County and York County) within SEQL region that can be used for water supply generation and model development.
- Develop tools that will help improve our ability to evaluate, study, and model linkages between different types of environmental systems: hydrologic, geomorphic, ecological, and climatic.
- Explore the use of annual and seasonal measurements of large lake surface temperatures as a new ecological indicator of the overall thermal content of those lakes, and construct an estimator of seasonal large lake heat budgets.
Description:
The Mid-Atlantic region (MAIA) is comprised of southern New York, southern and western New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, northeastern North Carolina, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. in the lower-48 American States. It is an ecosystem rich in streams, wetlands, forests, estuaries, breeding birds, biological diversity and a large human population. This collection of data provides the resources to document the alteration of critical landscape ecological components and processes within the MAIA region. This poster will demonstrate the creation of a land use/ land cover change data set along with examples of ecological change in the MAIA area. The data set is developed from the 1970s North American Landscape Characterization (NALC) imagery and the National Land Cover Data (NLCD).
The NALC program, a U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program was created in
the early 1990s. This program packaged Multispectral Scanner(MSS) satellite images from the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s along with a file containing a model of the elevations covered by the grouped images. There are 530 groupings called triplicates, which when combined, cover the Lower 48 States and Mexico. The National Land Cover Characterization project was created in 1995 to support the original Multi-Resolution Land Characterization (MRLC) initiative of developing a nationally consistent land cover data set of the Lower 48 States from Thematic Mapper (TM) data called National Land Cover Data 1992 (NLCD 92).
The MAIA land use/land cover change data set was developed from a digital land use/land cover map derived from the 1970s NALC coverage and the NLCD aggregated to the same land