The Long Island Sound Watershed land cover and land cover change covers all HUC 12 watersheds in Connecticut and New York that drain into Long Island Sound. The project includes land cover for this area from 1985, 1990, 1995, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2015. There are two 1985-2015 land cover change maps - a change to and a change from. Beyond land cover, the land cover occurring in riparian areas (300 feet from a stream or shoreline) is included for the Connecticut and New York portions of the Long Island Sound Watershed. Impervious surface area and percent for each HUC 12 basin is also included. The estimates rely on land cover as an input.
This project was funded by the federal/state partnership Long Island Sound Study (LISS), a National Estuary Program. It is intended to give resource managers, researchers, and the public information about the way the landscape draining into the Sound has changed over the time period from 1985 to 2015. Because this time span is approximately the same as that of the LISS itself, it is a particularly apt dataset for those seeking insight into the land use-derived challenges to the health of the Sound, and our joint progress toward meeting these challenges. This study is an update and a geographic expansion of CLEAR’s Connecticut’s Changing Landscape project, which has been ongoing since 2004.
