Abstract
Riparian Land Cover Inventory for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Track: Ecology and Conservation Author(s): Raymond Crew, Rick Day Preserving and establishing healthy riparian forests and wetlands have numerous ecological benefits. Not understanding where proper buffers are, where they are missing, and how buffer conditions are changing over time are obstructions to maintaining and reestablishing buffers. The Chesapeake Bay Program Office funded Penn State University to inventory and analyze the riparian landcover conditions in the Bay watershed for 1990 and 2000. The watershed contains approximately 464,000 km of stream banks and waterbody perimeters. This prohibits generating a consistent inventory using conventional methods. A method was constructed and developed for the ArcGIS environment to regularly sample the land cover in the riparian zones and then generate statistics on a subwatershed scale. The primary data layers used were the 1:24K Resolution National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) and land-cover datasets produced by the mid-Atlantic Regional Earth Science Application Center (RESAC). Raymond Crew Penn State University Crop & Soil Sciences 116 Ag Sci & Ind Building University Park , PA 16802 US Phone: 814-863-7001 E-mail: rcc105@psu.edu Rick Day Penn State University Crop and Soil Sciences 116 Ag Sci & Ind Building University Park , PA 16802 US Phone: 814-863-1615 E-mail: rday@psu.edu |
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