This webinar originally aired on 27 October 2015.
Land use and land cover have significant impacts on ecosystem health—with impervious surface runoff and natural areas that provide flood protection or pollutant filtering being obvious examples. Information on how and where these and other land changes are occurring is essential to understanding the potential impacts from past management practices and choosing the right course of action for the future. NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management’s Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) provides nationally standardized land cover and change information for the coastal United States. Regional monitoring data are updated every five years. Dates goes back to 1996 or earlier in most locations. Higher-resolution data products provide greater detail for some areas. This presentation will provide an overview of these data sets, show where to find them on the Digital Coast, and highlight several tools that make use of them. These tools include the Land Cover Atlas—an online viewer that allows users to analyze change statistics and maps for their county or watershed of interest—and a new “How-to” that walks users through key land cover indicators of water quality. Learn more at http://coast.noaa.gov/dataregistry/search/collection/info/ccapregional.
This webinar was presented by Rebecca Love and Nate Herold of NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management, and it was co-sponsored by MEAM, OpenChannels.org, and the EBM Tools Network.