NEW! Land Cover for the Long Island Sound Watershed

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You may have heard of the Connecticut’s Changing Landscape project and website that provides basic land cover information through five directly comparable land cover datasets, from 1985, 1990, 1995, 2002 and 2006, allowing us to look at, and quantify, landscape change in Connecticut.  Now, thanks to the support of the Long Island Sound Study, we are happy to announce the Long Island Sound Watershed’s Changing Landscape which adds:

  • an expanded study area to cover the lower Long Island Sound Watershed including portions of Westchester County, NY, NY city and northern Long Island,
  • a new date, 2010, of land cover,
  • land cover analysis within the riparian zone for the expanded study area, and
  • new data analysis based on HUC-12 watersheds, including impervious cover estimates.

The new website includes pages with maps of land cover and change, riparian area land cover and change and impervious cover estimates by watershed. These maps all have basic tools such as zoom, address search, and layer comparison. Click inside the maps on any basin to see a pop-up of the land cover breakdown for the basin as well as a bar chart and pie chart.  And you now can share on facebook, google+ or twitter – just what you always wanted!

The Interactive Map facilitates further comparison of all the data layers (look for the Layers button on the top) and different basemap options (look for the Basemap button the top). Basin statistics are reported for HUC-12 (approximately sub-regional) basins and are also summarized by the study area, states and HUC-8 (larger) basins.

And finally, for the GIS folks, you will find instructions on connecting to map services and data download.

Check out the site and let us know what you think. Comments and suggestions are always welcome (clear@uconn.edu)! And if this is the gift you wanted this December (or even if it isn’t), Happy Holidays!