Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
8.1 Introduction
The issue of protecting surface water from the impacts of stormwater across regions
and in particular urbanized areas has potentially serious legal and monetary rami-
fications. This is on top of what some may feel as moral and/or ethical obligations
because of its relationship to a higher quality of life. Geospatial technologies and
data can be used to discover, model, and visualize environmental change with sev-
eral opportunities for environmental resource managers. For example, the ability
to improve watershed planning and management decisions is inextricably linked
to impervious land cover. This chapter explores how two geotechnologies, remote
sensing and GIS modeling, are used to help assess the potential impact of con-
comitant changes in land cover and imperviousness in the context of watershed
management. Even though GIS is recognized as an essential element throughout the
process of adaptive watershed management, substantial work remains to be done
before its potential is fully realized and functionally and operationally integrated
(Walker and Mostaghimi
2009
).
Kentucky's complex and rich landscapes are changing as a result of both human
interventions and natural fluctuations posing a challenge to measuring, monitoring
and modeling such changes (Lee et al.
2009
). In turn, the Commonwealth's water-
sheds and complex hydrologic networks are being impacted by temporal change -
expressed as a change in land cover as well as land use. The link between water
quality and watershed health and land cover/land use and their change over time
becomes evident from the fact that Kentucky's section 303(d) list contains as many
as 9,800 km of streams and 2,097 pollutant-water body combinations. This list is
the official report to the Legislative Branch of government on the condition of water
resources in Kentucky (Kentucky Division of Water
2008
).
Using moderate resolution imagery and remote sensing methods to extract infor-
mation is a cost and time effective solution to help quantify and spatially identify
where the landscape is undergoing changes. Land cover change characterized using
remote sensing-derived data layers can be correlated with trends in urbanization and
changes in imperviousness (Bauer et al.
2005
). Through two NASA-funded projects,
the Kentucky Landscape Snapshot Project (KLS), and the Kentucky Landscape
Census Project (KLC) Kentucky was able to be one of the first states to gener-
ate its portion of the 2001-era baseline land cover layer. Ultimately, this was the
contribution to the 2001 National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD01) (Homer et al.
2007
). Subsequently, the KLC produced the first, 2005 update to that dataset, with
which estimates of land cover change become possible on a statewide basis during
the intervening 4 years. An Anderson Level III for forested lands and wetlands for
2001, and a 2005-era Anderson Level II updates to NLCD01 are also now available
because of these previous efforts. All these products are at a 30 m ground resolution
(Harp et al.
2006
; Kentucky Division of Geographic Information
2009a
,
b
;Palmer
2007
; Zourarakis and Palmer
2008
). There are a number of applications that these
previous efforts are now being used that have environmental resource management
