Thomas R. Moreland | USGS Science

USGS2019

The driving forces of land change in the Northern Piedmont of the United States

Driving forces facilitate or inhibit land-use/land-cover change. Human driving forces include political, economic, cultural, and social attributes that often change across time and space. Remotely sensed imagery provides regional land-change data for the Northern Piedmont, an ecoregion of the United States that continued to urbanize after 1970 through conversion of agricultural and forest land covers to developed uses. Eight major driving forces facilitated most of the land conversion; other drivers inhibited or slowed change. A synergistic web of drivers may be more important in understanding land change than individual drivers by themselves.

Maryl;New York;Pennsylvania;Virginia↗

USGS2009

Land Cover Trends in the Southern Florida Coastal Plain

This report presents an assessment of land use and land cover change in the Southern Florida Coastal Plain ecoregion for the period from 1973 to 2000. The ecoregion is one of 84 level III ecoregions defined by the Environmental Protection Agency; ecoregions have been designed to serve as a spatial framework for environmental resource management and denote areas that contain a geographically distinct assemblage of biotic and abiotic phenomena, including geology, physiography, vegetation, climate, soils, land use, wildlife, and hydrology. The Southern Florida Coastal Plain ecoregion covers an area of approximately 22,407 square kilometers [8,651 square miles] across the lower portion of the Florida peninsula, from Lake Okeechobee southward through the Florida Keys. It comprises flat plains with wet soils, marshland and swamp land cover with Everglades and palmetto prairie vegetation types.

Scientific Investigations Report↗