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Track: Agriculture
Jeffrey Miller
Earth Satellite Corporation
6011 Executive Boulevard Suite 400
Rockville, MD 20852-3804
Telephone: 301-231-0660
Fax: 301-231-5020
E-mail: jmiller@earthsat.com
Strategic Farmland Mapping for the Chesapeake Bay
Defining Issue: The conversion of farmland in the Chesapeake Bay area has proceeded at an aggressive rate over the past several decades. Public and private efforts to manage farmland conversion will benefit from GIS databases and maps depicting the location and extent of farmlands with high potential for controlling conversion and preserving farm landscapes. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the American Farmland Trust, representing the Chesapeake Farms for the Future Board, contracted with Earth Satellite Corporation to develop hardcopy maps and GIS databases as strategic tools for farmland protection and farmland conversion management in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The purpose of the paper is to describe the technical and modeling aspects of strategic farmland mapping for the Chesapeake Bay. GIS Solution: Develop multicriteria GIS databases and maps of Chesapeake Bay strategic farmland. County and Statewide hardcopy maps and GIS databases depicting the pattern of Maryland and Delaware development
pressure on farmland, farmland productivity, farmland viability, environmental sensitivity, strategic farmlands, and existing farmland protection are to be produced along with descriptive statistics for each geographic theme. The map themes and databases along with a PC-based ArcView Version 3.0 interface will serve as decision support tools for farmland protection management. Methodology: Data from multiple sources and scales were compiled and rasterized as inputs for multicriteria additive and interaction modeling of strategic farmland. ARC GRID was applied to model development pressure, farmland productivity, farmland viability, and environmental sensitivity. These models served as inputs to the strategic farmland model, which represents farmlands of high potential value as protected farmland in controlling the conversion of farmland to developed landcover. Software: Data compilation management was conducted through UNIX ArcInfo, while map conversion was conducted through ARCEDIT. Raster model
processing and statistical analysis were conducted through GRID. ARCPLOT was employed to generate statewide and county-level hardcopy map series. Interactive query and display of the GIS databases is proposed through an Avenue-driven ArcView Version 3 interface. Additional statistical analysis was conducted with Microsoft Excel.
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