Primary Learning Objectives
Technical Skills:
- Access and process satellite imagery using NASA’s APPEARS platform
- Work with different spatial data formats and resolutions
- Perform raster analysis and visualization
- Calculate and interpret NDVI values from multispectral satellite data
Analytical Skills:
- Compare vegetation health between areas affected and unaffected by saltwater intrusion
- Evaluate limitations and uncertainties in geospatial analysis
In this lesson you will:
- Understand the relationship between sealevel rise, salt water intrusion, and agricultural productivity in Maryland’s coastal regions
- Learn to work with and analyze multiple types of geospatial data (raster datasets) using Python
- Interpret vegetation health patterns using satellite-derived NDVI measurements
- Evaluate potential future impacts of sea level rise on agricultural land
This lesson will allow the learner to gain a deper understanding of the followinf concepts - Recognizing the economic importance of agriculture in Maryland - Understanding how sea level rise is impacting coastal farming - Identifying the role of remote sensing in monitoring environmental changes - Connecting local agricultural challenges to broader climate change impacts
This module can help to contextualize the impact of saltwater inundation. For this module, we will identify cropland, and then, using the NOAA sea level rise estimations, we can calculate the difference in productivity using NDVI as a measure of vegetation health. A graphical time series allows us to see areas impacted by sea level rise.
First, we can find the county-level statistics of harvestable acreage. We are using the Crop Data Layer (CDL) from the United States Department of Agriculture National Agriculture Statistics Service (USDA NASS)
- Use API to call in the CDL dataset to map crop types.
After getting familiar with the dataset, we can modify it. Because we are interested in the impact of sea level rise and the effect we can find that data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- Access the Sea level rise (elevation dataset) to identify new areas of potential areas that are at risk of future flooding. Clip to county of interest
- Compare the CDL with the SLR mask and without to identify the NOAA estimated loss of land.
Then using Landsat create a time series for the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) of the masked cropland, derive insights about trends in NDVI.
- Use NDVI to create a time series looking back in time at areas that have experienced flooding to visualize the movement from productive farms to moderate quality.
This all together would allow us to make a predictive analysis for Maryland in the future under the projections of sea level rise. Given the current conditions, subtracting the sea level rise inundated areas.
The data story we have derived concerns sea level rise in Maryland and its impact on production levels within the state. This module can help students draw from multiple data sources and derive insights using historical and future viewing data sets.
We can prompt the user to think about future impacts outside the direct sea level rise projections, allowing them to include a full picture and finally using that picture to identify economic impacts that action or inaction causes. This begs the question: What can the public do to enact changes rather than putting pressure on farmers to change?