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STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Urban growth and change places a heavy demand on state and local
governments to seek better planning and management approaches. Increasing
urbanization puts pressure on natural resources and existing infrastructure.
Elected officials in state and local governments require timely
information products to support policy decisions on issues that
are often interrelated and span several political boundaries. Growth
assessment, infrastructure inventory and planning, environmental
assessment, and risk management impact and drive policy decisions
for these managers.
SOCIAL BENEFITS
Tracking change within a jurisdiction allows local government
officials to monitor growth and development in an organized fashion.
This is especially true for areas without zoning regulations. This
has allowed communities to coarsely monitor and assess issues such
as urban green space, zoning implications, prioritizing site assessments
for storm water runoff taxation, flood plain encroachment, and simple
land cover assessments. Knowing these development patterns allows
resources, both fiscal and human, to be managed in more cost effective
ways.
NASA`s
UNIQUE CAPACITY AND CONTRIBUTION
NASA’s continuing support of the Landsat series has made change
detection an operational opportunity for many communities. This
imagery and its derived information products has enabled communities
to track and quantify the type of change taking place at the urban/rural
interface and within the urban areas themselves. An example would
be a transition from agricultural and/or forested land to impervious
surface along the urban/rural interface. The temporal frequency
is greater than those that are financially feasibly through conventional
aerial survey. The incorporation of these imagery products and derived
products has empowered these communities to ‘think outside
of the box’ and find new applications of these imagery products
through combination with their GIS data applications. By appropriately
modeling the change detected a surrogate for a population estimate
can be created. This has opened the doors to many applications in
the realms of homeland security, risk assessment and exposure, as
well as true growth monitoring.
DECISION
SUPPORT SOLUTIONS
Decision-makers within government must deal with a wide-variety
of issues that have economic, social, and political consequences.
These imagery products will support risk assessment applications
in Homeland Security, Health and Disease Monitoring, and numerous
other environmental, planning, and demographic applications occurring
at local levels that affect the citizenry. Tracking change within
their jurisdiction allows them to monitor growth and development
in an organized fashion and deploy resources more effectively.
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