Outreach

Activities

Mansfield Middle school

Zhang met with the Principal Candace Morell on Nov 14, 2014. The principal and the sciences teachers are enthusiastic about incorporating GIS as enrichment activities for their science after school activities and they think it’s a very good idea to let middle school students learn the Geospatial technology—GIS, and they are interested in exploring this afterschool activities. Zhang worked with the science teachers and set up the afterschool activities in the Fall 2015. Below are some pictures took during the outreach activities.


Photo Gallery

 

Basic Educational Information

Land use/cover change

The LISW landscape has gone through tremendous changes over the past two centuries. For example, up to 90% forests were cleared for farming by the mid-1800s. As farms were abandoned, much of the land has reverted back to mixed hardwood forest. Over the past fifty years, the region has undergone significant land use changes as housing and industrial development has encroached upon formerly rural and forested land.

With the commercial development, more and more people move to LISW. Nowadays, over 8 million people live in the LISW, which results in great landscape changes in this area. The rapidly growth of population have a strong impact on land use in the watershed. Besides forested lands, this region has lost 25-35 percents of original marshes. Soil erosion caused by human activity is another reason for land use/cover changes. The eroded sediment remained in the water has reduced biological activities.

For example, the following figure shows how the land use/cover has changed from 1992-2005 in this region:

The below figure shows the land use changes in a zoomed-in area in Hartford, CT from 1992 to 2005:

The below figure shows the land use changes in Connecticut from 1985-2005:

Invasive plant species

 

Other resources

1. Invasive Plant Atlas of New England (IPANE).

2. Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR) at UCONN.

3. CT NEMO Program (Protecting Connecticut’s natural resources through better land use planning).

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