Urban Dynamics: Temporal Changes in Agricultural Land Use Patuxent River Watershed, Maryland

A progressive, geo-referenced representation of agricultural land use change in the Patuxent River Watershed was developed in an effort to provide USGS researchers and modelers with the spatial data necessary to identify and correlate trends associated with hydrologic and biologic data. A wide variety of information sources were combined to produce an integrated and multi-scale GIS that documents change in agriculture.

The agricultural lands data layers were developed using GIS modeling techniques and the integration of data sets for each of the selected time-periods (1850, 1900, 1953, 1972, 1982, 1992). Classification crosswalks were established between different data sources. Differences between spatial data sources were reconciled through additional interpretation of land cover categories. The primary data sources used were Census of Agriculture and land use/cover data sets previously developed for other studies. The urban extent was derived through manual interpretation of topographic maps and Landsat multispectral imagery for the Baltimore-Washington Regional Metropolitan Study conducted previously.

The study area focuses on the Patuxent River Watershed in Maryland. It is a subregion of the regional Baltimore-Washington study area for which urban land use through time has been developed.

Research Activities

Agricultural History

Agricultural Database

Source Materials

Methodology

Population Statistics

Metadata

References