Challenge
For decades, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has mapped the state's land cover and impervious surfaces (i.e., concrete and asphalt). Understanding these surfaces is crucial for preventing flooding, water quality issues, and urban heat island effects. However, insufficient funding for the 2020 update meant the agency could only map land use/land cover, creating a gap in vital impervious surface data.
Solution
As the state was completing the land use/land cover mapping, NOAA’s Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) was beginning a nationwide high-resolution mapping initiative, creating an inventory for the coastal U.S. From this, the C-CAP team was able to provide up-to-date impervious surface data for the entire state of New Jersey, delivering information that helped the agency evaluate the land that had transitioned from non-urban to urban in the previous five years. This information rounds out the larger land use/land cover data that supports the state’s efforts to monitor ecosystem and human health and make informed policies.
