Monitoring the locations and distributions of land-cover changes is important for establishing the relationship between policy decisions, regulatory actions and subsequent land-use activities.
The EPA’s Landscape Characterization Branch (LCB) develops approaches for ecological assessment at regional and national scales. In doing so, the branches aim to improve the prediction of ecological indicators to enable informed ecological risk reduction and remediation. Towards that end, LCB is conducting research on the spatial characteristics of landscapes, including the distribution of resources, stressors, and biophysical processes, and how those characteristics change over time.
A pilot project that landscape addresses change in the Albemarle-Pamlico Drainage Basin is being conducted and funded by EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL), Environmental Sciences Division (ESD), and Landscape Characterization Branch (LCB) located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
Land-cover for large geographic regions is produced on semi-regularly but is often a few years old. Ideally, annually updated data would be available to support environmental status and trends assessments and ecosystem process modeling. This project examines the potential for vegetation phenology based land-cover classification of the Albemarle-Pamlico Basin to be performed annually.
APNEP is working with the LCB to make this data and landscape change viewer available to potential users to evaluate both data utility and quality. Specifically, EPA is requesting that users provide input concerning the functionality of the Web page, the usefulness of the yearly data coverages, and any insights concerning data quality. Feedback from potential data users will determine the future provision of data products to the user community.
Please note that this is a draft product that is subject to further modification.