Fall NEARC 2024

Current, accurate land cover information is a common foundational data set that can be used to address a wide range of management issues, from flooding risk and natural infrastructure to policy evaluation and land use planning. Knowing what exists on the ground (and how it has changed through time) gives planners more information, and the better that data, the better our understanding.

For more than two decades, NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management has been producing consistent, accurate land cover and change information for the coastal U.S through its Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP), with the goal of continually updating these maps every 5 years. In recent years, NOAA has been working to establish an operational higher resolution land cover product line, allowing for local and site-specific applications. This work has been possible because of the wealth of available imagery and lidar data, improved software and hardware capabilities, and artificial intelligence classification techniques.

This presentation will review the products that have been released for most coastal areas, nationally, plans for additional data and updates, as well as focus on our most recent products (just released) for the state of Maine. We will speak to the methods, accuracy, and potential applications of that data, as well as the partnership NOAA had with the state to fund this mapping.