Looking Ahead to Maryland 2050: Living in Our Environment

Abstracts

Panel II:  Maryland in a Changing World

Land Use

Steve Prince, Professor, Department of Geography

Abstract
Counties, State and regional governmental agencies are now charged with the responsibility of administration, planning, management, and development policy at unprecedented scales and complexity. Homeland security, environmental impacts, clean-up of the Chesapeake Bay, control of sprawl, are all examples. Meanwhile dramatic increases in the level of detail and the resolution of land cover, land use and land surface processes that can be observed using remote sensing techniques are taking place. These advances are occurring not only in satellite remote sensing, but also in geographical information Science (GIS) and numerical spatial analysis. Taken together, these developments constitute a “geospatial revolution”. Many of the elements needed for application of geospatial solutions are already present at the University of Maryland; what is missing is a coordinated approach to research and applications. Activities in the Geography Department that are relevant to Maryland and the Mid-Atlantic region will be reviewed, including: Mid Atlantic highlands regional population, and settlement simulation; Power sharing in the National Forest; Effects of regional land cover on national parks; Modeling urban sprawl in the Mid-Atlantic region; Monitoring Maryland's forest reserves; Forest structure, carbon, hydrology using LiDAR; Assessing eastern North America forest disturbance and regrowth; Coastal marsh loss and sea level rise; Measurement of aquatic suspended material in the Chesapeake Bay; Net ecosystem production and carbon sequestration; Cropland mapping and yield measurement, health effects of agricultural pesticides; Mid-Atlantic land cover, impervious surfaces, tree cover, crop type, wetlands, watershed classification, nutrient, sediment and runoff modeling, growth modeling and land use policy, urbanization; Internet ecosystem simulation modeling; Historical land use in the Shenandoah Valley; LiDAR detection and mapping of Chesapeake archaeological sites.

Speaker information
Dr. Stephen D. Prince is a Professor of Geography at the University of Maryland-College Park. He received a BSc from Bristol University, UK, and a PhD from the University of Lancaster, UK, both in Plant Science. He has worked in Central Africa, at the University of London, and at NASA GSFC before joining the UMD faculty in 1989.  Prince’s work emphasizes biological and physical processes that operate across large areas of the Earth’s surface, often using remote sensing as a measurement tool. The Regional Earth Sciences Application Center (RESAC), directed by Prince, was founded with a NASA grant to explore the applications of Earth Science to regional environmental issues. Research in Maryland involves the effects of urbanization on land surface processes, studied throughout the mid-Atlantic region of the USA, especially in the 166,000km2 Chesapeake Bay watershed. Prince currently leads EPA-sponsored research on watershed classification with the Woods Hole Research Center and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (of which he is an associate researcher). A more recent activity has been the use of Internet geographical information systems (GIS) to allow advanced hydrological and ecosystem simulations to be run remotely.