Urban Land Use Inventorying with Small Scale Aerial Photography

The underlying aim of this thesis is to show that small scale NASA aerial photography is a valuable planning tool through which urban planners can extract the accurate land use information necessary to their planning and decision making processes. This aim will be achieved through an examination of the following points: 1. The utility of the aerial photography to urban planners possessing little photo interpretation experience or sophisticated equipment for the extraction of information. 2 The accuracy and suitability of the land use information obtained from the interpretation to the urban planning process. 3. The availability of NASA high altitude aerial photography for the majority of the SMSA’s in the United States. A positive reaction to each of these points would be a strong recommendation for the adoption of small scale photography by urban planners. It is the aim of this study, therefore, to systematically analyze small scale photography and assess its many characteristics that may be valuable to planners who desire land use information. A conclusion will be based on the merits of the photography that emerge from this investigation

Rural Land-Use Trends in the Conterminous United States, 1950-2000.

In order to understand the magnitude, direction, and geographic distribution of land-use changes, we evaluated land-use trends in U.S. counties during the latter half of the 20th century. Our paper synthesizes the dominant spatial and temporal trends in population, agriculture, and urbanized land uses, using a variety of data sources and an ecoregion classification as a frame of reference. A combination of increasing attractiveness of nonmetropolitan areas in the period 1970–2000, decreasing household size, and decreasing density of settlement has resulted in important trends in the patterns of developed land. By 2000, the area of low-density, exurban development beyond the urban fringe occupied nearly 15 times the area of higher density urbanized development. Efficiency gains, mechanization, and agglomeration of agricultural concerns has resulted in data that show cropland area to be stable throughout the Corn Belt and parts of the West between 1950 and 2000, but decreasing by about 22% east of the Mississippi River. We use a regional case study of the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions to focus in more detail on the land-cover changes resulting from these dynamics. Dominating were land-cover changes associated with the timber practices in the forested plains ecoregions and urbanization in the piedmont ecoregions. Appalachian ecoregions show the slowest rates of landcover change. The dominant trends of tremendous exurban growth, throughout the United States, and conversion and abandonment of agricultural lands, especially in the eastern United States, have important implications because they affect large areas of the country, the functioning of ecological systems, and the potential for restoratio

Projected Surface Raidiative Forcing Due to 2000-2050 Land-cover Land-use Albedo Change Over the Eastern United States

Satellite-derived contemporary land-cover land-use (LCLU) and albedo data and modeled future LCLU are used to study the impact of LCLU change from 2000 to 2050 on surface albedo and radiative forcing for 19 ecoregions in the eastern United States. The modeled 2000–2050 LCLU changes indicate a future decrease in both agriculture and forested land and an increase in developed land that induces ecoregion radiative forcings ranging from −0.175 to 0.432 W m−2 driven predominately by differences in the area and type of LCLU change. At the regional scale, these projected LCLU changes induce a net negative albedo decrease (−0.001) and a regional positive radiative forcing of 0.112Wm−2. This overall positive forcing (i.e., warming) is almost 4 times greater than that estimated for documented 1973–2000 LCLU albedo change published in a previous study using the same methods

Landsat Science: 40 Years of Innovation and Opportunity

Landsat satellites have provided unparalleled Earth-observing data for nearly 40 years, allowing scientists to describe, monitor and model the global environment during a period of time that has seen dramatic changes in population growth, land use, and climate. The success of the Landsat program can be attributed to well-designed instrument specifications, astute engineering, comprehensive global acquisition and calibration strategies, and innovative scientists who have developed analytical techniques and applications to address a wide range of needs at local to global scales (e.g., crop production, water resource management, human health and environmental quality, urbanization, deforestation and biodiversity). Early Landsat contributions included inventories of natural resources and land cover classification maps, which were initially prepared by a visual interpretation of Landsat imagery. Over time, advances in computer technology facilitated the development of sophisticated image processing algorithms and complex ecosystem modeling, enabling scientists to create accurate, reproducible, and more realistic simulations of biogeochemical processes (e.g., plant production and ecosystem dynamics). Today, the Landsat data archive is freely available for download through the USGS, creating new opportunities for scientists to generate global image datasets, develop new change detection algorithms, and provide products in support of operational programs such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). In particular, the use of dense (approximately annual) time series to characterize both rapid and progressive landscape change has yielded new insights into how the land environment is responding to anthropogenic and natural pressures. The launch of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) satellite in 2012 will continue to propel innovative Landsat science

Rural Land‐Use Trends In The Conterminous United States, 1950–2000

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117044/1/eap20051561851.pd

Landsat Data Continuity Mission - Launch Fever

The year 2013 will be an exciting period for those that study the Earth land surface from space, particularly those that observe and characterize land cover, land use, and the change of cover and use over time. Two new satellite observatories will be launched next year that will enhance capabilities for observing the global land surface. The United States plans to launch the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) in January. That event will be followed later in the year by the European Space Agency (ESA) launch of the first Sentinel 2 satellite. Considered together, the two satellites will increase the frequency of opportunities for viewing the land surface at a scale where human impact and influence can be differentiated from natural change. Data from the two satellites will provide images for similar spectral bands and for comparable spatial resolutions with rigorous attention to calibration that will facilitate cross comparisons. This presentation will provide an overview of the LDCM satellite system and report its readiness for the January launch

Monitoring and modelling landscape dynamics

International audienceChanges in land cover and land use are among the most pervasive and important sources of recent alterations of the Earth's land surface.This special issue also presents new directions in modelling landscape dynamics. Agent-based models have primarily been used to simulate local land use and land cover changes processes with a focus on decision making (Le 2008; Matthews et al. 2007; Parker et al. 2003; Bousquet and Le Page 2001)

The Global Landsat Archive: Status, Consolidation, and Direction

New and previously unimaginable Landsat applications have been fostered by a policy change in 2008 that made analysis-ready Landsat data free and open access. Since 1972, Landsat has been collecting images of the Earth, with the early years of the program constrained by onboard satellite and ground systems, as well as limitations across the range of required computing, networking, and storage capabilities. Rather than robust on-satellite storage for transmission via high bandwidth downlink to a centralized storage and distribution facility as with Landsat-8, a network of receiving stations, one operated by the U.S. government, the other operated by a community of International Cooperators (ICs), were utilized. ICs paid a fee for the right to receive and distribute Landsat data and over time, more Landsat data was held outside the archive of the United State Geological Survey (USGS) than was held inside, much of it unique. Recognizing the critical value of these data, the USGS began a Landsat Global Archive Consolidation (LGAC) initiative in 2010 to bring these data into a single, universally accessible, centralized global archive, housed at the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The primary LGAC goals are to inventory the data held by ICs, acquire the data, and ingest and apply standard ground station processing to generate an L1T analysis-ready product. As of January 1, 2015 there were 5,532,454 images in the USGS archive. LGAC has contributed approximately 3.2 million of those images, more than doubling the original USGS archive holdings. Moreover, an additional 2.3 million images have been identified to date through the LGAC initiative and are in the process of being added to the archive. The impact of LGAC is significant and, in terms of images in the collection, analogous to that of having had twoadditional Landsat-5 missions. As a result of LGAC, there are regions of the globe that now have markedly improved Landsat data coverage, resulting in an enhanced capacity for mapping, monitoring change, and capturing historic conditions. Although future missions can be planned and implemented, the past cannot be revisited, underscoring the value and enhanced significance of historical Landsat data and the LGAC initiative. The aim of this paper is to report the current status of the global USGS Landsat archive, document the existing and anticipated contributions of LGAC to the archive, and characterize the current acquisitions of Landsat-7 and Landsat-8. Landsat-8 is adding data to the archive at an unprecedented rate as nearly all terrestrial images are now collected. We also offer key lessons learned so far from the LGAC initiative, plus insights regarding other critical elements of the Landsat program looking forward, such as acquisition, continuity, temporal revisit, and the importance of continuing to operationalize the Landsat program

Simulated responses of soil organic carbon stock to tillage management scenarios in the Northwest Great Plains

© 2007 Tan et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens