Overview of Land Cover Mapping
for the Mid-Atlantic RESAC

Current satellite maps of the Mid-Atlantic region provide an indication of the diversity of land cover types throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Until recently such maps were insufficient or inappropriate for many applications, and improvements are increasingly in demand, for example, in the Chesapeake Bay Program  where an ability to discriminate grass and pasture lands from croplands would dramatically improve modeling of chemical runoff to the Bay.

The Mid-Atlantic RESAC builds on the expertise of its partners to provide improved land cover/use maps of the mid-Atlantic region through the application of new techniques and data sets from remote sensing platforms that have recently, or will soon, become available. These techniques are developed primarily through our parallel support of a very wide range of land cover research projects which give us exclusive or special access to advanced techniques and data.

Land cover measurement is on the threshold of major changes through the advent of very high spatial resolution (1-5 m) remotely sensed satellite data. The very first sub-meter resolution imagery from space, acquired in October 1999, was focused on Washington DC. We have access to the first examples of these data via our CRESS (Commercial Remote sensing of Earth System Science) project. Higher spatial and spectral resolution multitemporal data is also available to us from EOS-MODIS. These data allow the discrimination of various densities of residential development and riparian buffers which have important implications for land use planning and chemical runoff to the Chesapeake Bay.

The structure of vegetation canopies is also fundamental to understanding the function of canopies. We can incorporate variation in canopy structure by exploring variations in important features measured over the same area and time using optical imagers together with canopy lasers, such as the Vegetation Canopy LIDAR. VCL promises to revolutionize remote sensing and its incorporation in the Mid-Atlantic RESAC will allow very rapid development of applications. This is augmented with high spectral and spatial resolution data from airborne instruments (e.g., 3DI's Airborne Imaging Spectroradiometer).

Of course we cannot map the entire Chesapeake Bay catchment with these state-of-the-art instruments. Instead we are focusing on a series of test sites and use the information gathered at high resolution to improve maps derived from more coarse resolution imagery of the entire Mid-Atlantic region.

Ecosystem Modeling   Planning and Urban Growth   Land Manager Information System   Integrated Monitoring    Outreach