| Abstract: |
Research has shown clear evidence that land cover changes have significant impacts on a variety of environmental and ecological conditions and processes. Land cover change modifies the structure and functioning of ecosystems, which in turn have consequences for the biodiversity of native flora and fauna. Understanding social-environmental interactions through the consequences of land cover change requires the modeling of ecosystem impacts over time at a variety of spatial scales. Landscape indicators are models that indicate the potential fitness of a landscape to support a particular ecosystem condition such as providing favorable habitat for native birds. The models are based on measures of species diversity and/or indices of biotic integrity, and metrics of land cover and landscape pattern. This presentation explores the effect of land cover change on native bird habitat within the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Four land cover data sets derived from satellite imagery of the Chesapeake Bay watershed for 1984, 1992, 2001, and 2006 are analyzed at the county, watershed (HUC 11), and moderate-resolution grid scales. Bird habitat is calculated as the percent forest within the 3 x 3 neighborhood around each pixel of the land cover dataset and visualized at each resolution over the entire watershed. The moderate-scale resolution grid analysis visualizes the distribution of good, moderate and poor bird habitat, which comprise approximately 30, 30, and 40 percent of the watershed area respectively. Small increases (< one percent) in poor habitat are observed within each time period.
Keywords: land cover change, landscape indicators, habitat impacts, Chesapeake Bay
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