ANNAPOLIS — For the past 10 months, geospatial analysts have mapped 100,000 square miles of the Chesapeake Bay watershed to produce a high-resolution landscape map the public can use free of charge.
On Tuesday, Dec. 6, the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP) announced the completion of the Chesapeake Bay High-Resolution Land Cover Project, a color-coded map that has “improved the resolution of data 900 times,” according to Jeffrey Allenby, Director of Conservation Technology with the Chesapeake Conservancy in Annapolis.
The resolution of previous models was 30 meters by 30 meters, or about a quarter of an acre. “We could call everything within that quarter-acre ‘something’,” Allenby said, but the problem was identifying just what that something was.
The new high-resolution is 1 meter by 1 meter, which brings everything within that landscape into much sharper focus.
“It’s about 3 feet by 3 feet on the ground,” Allenby said. “Within that quarter acre we have 900 points of detail now.”
Chesapeake Conservancy, a small nonprofit in Annapolis, offered an innovative solution to help CBP improve available data about the Bay watershed.
The Chesapeake Conservancy’s Conservation Innovation Center (CIC) spearheaded a partnership with the University of Vermont and Worldview Solutions Inc. to complete the Chesapeake Bay High-resolution Land Cover Project, one of the largest high-resolution land cover datasets in the nation.
The $2.5 million project will be updated at least every two years, according to Allenby, who says the CBP is looking into obtaining private funding for updates. The current imagery is based on data from 2013, a “snapshot in time,” he said.
“This truly is what I call a ‘watershed moment,’ a new era for the conservation movement,” Joel Dunn, president and CEO of the Chesapeake Conservancy, said.
“Think of this innovative technology as an MRI for the landscape,” Dunn said. “The results of which are being harnessed, focused and deployed to practice precision conservation, helping to make the struggling Chesapeake Bay healthier.”
The precision Dunn refers to is an effort to get “the right restoration and conservation practices, in the right places at the right times,” according to a statement by the Chesapeake Conservancy.
In practical terms, using a high-tech tool to assess landscape features can allow a customized approach to conservation and restoration, rather than potentially inefficient and costlier cookie-cutter planning. Only one riparian buffer near a stream, for example, may be suitable in the case of two seemingly similar landscapes, Allenby said.
This type of precision has the potential to minimize the impact on the landowner and save money, Allenby said.
“It’s like going from a one-size-fits-all to a custom-tailored suit,” he said.
Royal Oak farmer Ed Heikes, who is a member of the Talbot County Farm Bureau’s board of directors and public affairs committee, said that “more accurate data is always better.”
“In the future we can determine with a better degree of confidence what the environmental impact would be,” Allenby said, “and also identify alternatives as a win-win (result).”
For instance, Allenby said, “A developer could use the information to plan a development that’s more ecologically friendly while allowing him to do what he wants to do.”
Previously, individual counties had to pay for high resolution mapping for making planning and zoning decisions. Now they will be able to access high-resolution imagery at no cost.
In addition to helping farmers, municipalities and developers, this “improved level of detail will enhance the evaluation of progress in support of the 2017 Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load Mid-Point Assessment (Bay TMDL),” the Chesapeake Conversancy said. “Accurate land use and land cover (LULC) information is one of the most important spatial datasets needed for environmental management in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.”
In response to a question about if this project is a type of environmental Big Brother, Allenby said, “We’re not calling people out.”
“We’re just representing what the landscape looks like. We don’t get into the enforcement side of (environmental practices),” he said.
“One of the biggest criticisms has been that we didn’t know what was in (a landowner’s) backyard,” Allenby said. Conservation efforts were based on an estimate of nutrient and sediment loads and where they were coming from.
“Land cover classification data is categorical information about the natural and human-made features that exist on the landscape, such as buildings, tree canopy and water,” according to the Chesapeake Conservancy. “Datasets vary in the geographic areas that they represent, their spatial resolution and the number of landscape feature types they describe.”
“Land cover is one of the principal data sets used by the CBP modeling suite to estimate the amount of nutrients and sediments transported across the watershed into the Chesapeake Bay. This high-resolution land cover data will inform the Bay TMDL Mid-Point Assessment (in 2017),” the Chesapeake Conservancy said.
Maps can be viewed at Chesapeake Conservancy’s Conservation Innovation Center (CIC) website, chesapeakeconservancy.org/conservation-innovation-center/land-cover-data-project
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