Woods Hole Research Center

Losing Open Space in Southern Maine:

Maine is at a developmental crossroads. Population growth in southern Maine (largely York and Cumberland Counties) has been at a record pace, with increases in these two counties alone making up half the population growth of the State since 1950. With population growth comes development and sprawl, usually at rate much higher than the population increase. From 1986 to 1993, some 30,000 acres of forestlands in Southern Maine were developed. Also, it is projected that Cumberland and York Counties will lose another 195,000 acres of private timberlands and 46,000 acres of agricultural land by the year 2050. These lands will go into an estimated 208,000 acres of new and suburb and urban lands, an increase of 56 percent. And of those who move to Southern Maine, it is estimated that 75 percent go to rural areas rather than to urban areas. The challenge is to slow these trends by increasing local awareness. This project offers land cover change maps of the area, offering insight into challenges, choices, and possible solutions.

Land Use and Land Cover in the Chesapeake Bay:

Restoration of the Chesapeake Bay has been the focus of a two-decade regional partnership of local, state, and federal agencies, including a network of scientists, politicians and political activists interacting through various committees, working groups, and advisory panels within the Chesapeake Bay Program. The overall health of the Bay has not declined since the restoration was initiated in 1983, but many of the advances have been offset by the pressure of increasing population and exurban sprawl across the watershed. The needs of the Chesapeake Bay Program are many, but the greatest is accurate information on land cover and land use change, primarily to assess the implications for water quality, examine various restoration scenarios, and to calibrate spatial models of the urbanization process. The work of the Woods Hole Research Center focuses on developing that information for use in this key ecosystem.

Land Use Change in Southeastern Massachusetts:

The Woods Hole Research Center’s work in Southeastern Massachusetts examines the changes in the area of developed lands, promotes land conservation, maps the expansion of impermeable surfaces such as roads and parking lots, and educates the public about the services that intact natural ecosystems provide for free. This portion of Massachusetts is unique in that it is home to rare and endangered natural ecosystems (such as pine barrens, cedar swamps, and sensitive coastal environments), a large sole-source aquifer, and extensive and unspoiled tracts of forest. It is also home to threatened areas of cultural importance such as cranberry bogs and key historical towns and villages. This project focuses on past, present, and future development and reasons why ecosystems processes should be considered when planning for the future.

Losing Cape Cod:

Woods Hole Research Center scientists study the environment of Cape Cod not only because it is a combination of ecosystems unique in the New England region but also because it is changing rapidly - more rapidly than any other region in New England. Moreover, as ecologists the Center’s efforts must be good stewards of local resources, as well as global ones, if the Center’s research and outreach are to ring true. Like most of the US settled early by colonists, Cape Cod has undergone many dramatic changes in land use (how the land is utilized) and land cover (what occupies the land, regardless of how it is used). The Cape is changing from a farming and fishing economy with seasonal visitors to a larger, year-round population that builds bigger and more homes in what remains of open space. Sprawl is here, fueled by demographic forces, weaknesses in zoning, and lack of vision. The project tracks land use and land cover change from 1950.

Modeling Land Cover Change in the Chesapeake Bay:

Predictions of future land cover are important for a number of conservation and restoration goals, including targeting areas for restoration, assessing the impacts of possible restoration and mitigation scenarios, and determining the vulnerabilities of various resource lands to future land conversion. Because the conversion of natural resource lands to developed land cover poses a significant threat to the Chesapeake Bay, Woods Hole Research Center scientists have focused efforts on simulating and predicting urban and suburban land use change.

National Biomass and Carbon Dataset:

Scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center are producing a high-resolution “National Biomass and Carbon Dataset for the year 2000” (NBCD2000), the first ever spatially explicit inventory of its kind. The dataset is being produced as part of a project funded under NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program with additional support from the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools Project (LANDFIRE). The primary objective of the project is to generate a high-resolution (30 m), year-2000 baseline estimate of basal area-weighted canopy height, aboveground live dry biomass, and standing carbon stock for the conterminous United States.