Background

Changes in spatial patterns of land cover both within and adjacent to National Parks can greatly affect biological and physical processes within those parks. Specifically, landscape patterns related to disturbance, fragmentation, buffers, and land cover change have been shown to affect the abundance of rare and endangered species, levels of biodiversity, potential for invasion by exotic plants, habitat for birds, amphibians and other animals, water quality, and in-stream habitat for fish and other aquatic organisms. To address such concerns, aerial photography and satellite imagery can be used to monitor land use and land cover. The benefit of remote sensing for monitoring is that it provides complete spatial coverage compared to point or plot samples. Remote sensing therefore complements survey data by providing information on the context of data sampled at points while also facilitating extrapolation of point measurements across landscapes and a greater understanding of the ecological role of the parks in a regional context. The results from remote sensing change detection analyses can also be used to identify areas of rapid change to target management efforts.

Links
Reports
Contacts
Mark Lehman
NCRN GIS Specialist
202.342.1443 ext. 225

Objectives

• Map land cover to Anderson Level II classes for the parks and an appropriate buffer area. Explore the relationship of land cover to important park resources such as water quality, aquatic flora and fauna, terrestrial vertebrates and vegetation communities.
• Assess landscape pattern and identify patches that play a critical role in one or more ecosystem processes and may require special management consideration. Determine status and trends of key landscape metrics.

Measures

A suite of metrics to quantify the distribution and fragmentation of patches and land cover on the landscape is being selected. Critical categories of metrics will include p (proportion of area in different cover types), patch metrics (number and density of patches, mean patch size), perimeter and core area metrics, and measures of landscape connectivity including nearest neighbor metrics.

Status

The Remote Sensing and Landscape Pattern Protocol is complete and analyses have been done on four pilot parks to determine the extent to which grain size influences the ability to map important land cover classes. The parks selected for pilot study represent a range of park types in the NCR, including urban environments (ROCR), mixed land use (ANTI) and forests (PRWI, CATO)