Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
8.5 Summary and Conclusions
The importance of location and amount of changes in land cover, specifically imper-
viousness, as a leading and trailing indicator for watershed and stream health is
commonly acknowledged. This chapter has demonstrated the possibilities that land
cover change detection methods can provide for calculating indirect estimates of
imperviousness over temporal periods. Therefore, environmental resource experts
that utilize geospatial technologies and data for management and policy implanta-
tion recommendations should keep several things in mind that have been addressed
in this chapter.
1. Using moderate resolution imagery is a most cost and time effective solution to
help quantify and spatially identify where the landscape is undergoing changes
when an entire state is involved.
2. Care in data handling is critical for efficient and accurate integration with
existing and planned datasets during the reprojection process.
3. Landscapes are in a continual state of change. Identifying where, what, and the
temporal trend of those changes are critical for proactive land use planning that
has direct environmental and resulting ramifications for addressing stormwater
management concerns.
4. In the absence of specific impervious data, but with a reliable baseline, reason-
able retrospective and prospective impervious estimates can be made using new
and complementary data.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by funding from NASA Cooperative
Agreements NCC13-03010: “Taking GIS and Remote Sensing to the People of KY: Developing
an Open GIS Data Viewing & Distribution System for Kentucky” (KLC); and NAG13-02024
“Monitoring and Assessment of Forest and Urban Resources in the Commonwealth of Kentucky”
(KLS). Susan C. Lambert, Geographer, had the foresight to envision, design and procure fund-
ing for the Kentucky Landscape Snapshot, the Kentucky Landscape Census, and the Kentucky
Watershed Modeling Information Portal projects.
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