Chesapeake Conservancy

Chesapeake Conservancy used topographical mapping to create the Chesapeake Bay High-Resolution Land Cover Project, a high-resolution map of natural and man-made objects spanning the bay's 64,000 square mile watershed.[3] Initially a small-scale pilot program, using mapping to update the United States Geological Survey's existing land-change model of the bay, the Conservancy subsequently formed a partnership with the University of Vermont and WorldView Solutions to extrapolate the method to the whole bay.[3] The map has square meter resolution, substantially improving the previous 30-square-meter resolution data.[4] The data was then converted into a web-based application for public use, released in late 2016,[4] allowing those involved in conservation of the bay to locate optimal locations for tree buffers and other measures aimed at reducing soil and nutrient pollution in the bay's watershed. The Conservancy refers to this method as "precision conservation".[4] The Chesapeake Bay Program then combined the mapping data with land use data from the area to inform other conservation measures and attempts to improve land use,[3] as well as monitoring water pollution.[4] Chesapeake Conservancy also developed other applications to combine with different kinds of data, such as municipal stormwater reports. In 2014, the Conservancy received a grant from Microsoft, as well as access to their Azure cloud computing service, which drastically increased the speed of the web-based application.[3] A deep neural network model developed by Chesapeake Conservancy and Microsoft allowed the data used in creating the map to be updated at more frequent intervals, which will allow researchers to track changes such as deforestation, urbanization, and the impact of climate change.[5]

In 2018, Chesapeake Conservancy was awarded $1.1 million from the Environmental Protection Agency to support its land cover project and to expand a pilot program that maps how water moves across the landscape. The land cover project uses aerial images and computer programming to identify natural and man-made objects across the watershed. Updating the previous 2013/14 land cover dataset to more recent years, aids states, counties and local jurisdictions to see how development shapes the watershed over time. To map how water moves across the land, the Conservancy uses existing United States Geological Survey lidar data, which is collected by a plane bouncing a laser to the ground to collect the height of objects. Combining this information with the updated land cover map will help to precisely locate areas where restoration projects will be the most efficient. [6]

In 2017, the conservancy worked with former Virginia Senator John Warner to return an area of land adjacent to the Rappahannock River to the Rappahannock Native Americans who had been forcibly moved from the area in the 17th century.[7]