Land cover is a vital element to environmental management in both science and land-use planning. Tracking and understanding how land cover changes through time can provide planners with valuable insight to the effectiveness of land use management practices. This class will teach land use planners and managers how to use Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Puget Sound-wide High Resolution Change Detection (HRCD) data set that tracks canopy loss and impervious gain through time. 

The class includes a morning introductory session for a general audience and an afternoon session for ArcGIS users. The morning session will introduce the HRCD data set and include a simple, interactive demonstration. The optional afternoon section will feature a more in-depth look at applications directly relevant to participant’s land use management questions. While all invited are encouraged to attend both sessions, the afternoon assumes prior knowledge of ArcGIS and those who attend are encouraged to come with potential applications to work through as a group. (3 AICP CM Credits)

All participants must bring a laptop or tablet.

(Note: the fee for this class is being supplemented by a grant from the National Estuaries Program through Thurston County.)

Instructors:
Matthew Muller, MS, MBA is Land Cover Change Outreach Coordinator on the HRCD pilot project. Matt works in close collaboration in with local governments on applications designed to demonstrate the utility of the dataset, and is working to refine implementation protocols for the data.

Kenneth B. Pierce Jr. PhD, has been mapping PNW land cover for 13 years, first with the US Forest Service and for the last seven years with WDFW. He has spent the last five years developing the HRCD data set and leads the landscape spatial analytics section. He has also been serving as the Puget Sound Partnerships land-use/land-cover indicator lead since 2011 and chairs the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program’s terrestrial workgroup.