Use of LANDSAT for land use and habitat inventories for the New Jersey Pinelands

The New Jersey Heritage program surveyed available mapping information on landcover and vegetative communities and found that most commonly used sources, such as local land use maps and aerial photographs, were useful for individual sites, but either varied in their classifications or could not be used over extensive areas. A demonstration project using LANDSAT satellite information for the Great Egg Harbor/Tuckahoe watersheds was initiated with the goals of application (providing an inventory of vegetative communities and land use) flexibility (providing a method of collecting data which can be updated or modified in the future); and efficiency (allowing for an acceptable cost level by having staff undertake the project and avoid the more costly methods from air photo interpretation or on-site surveying. The classification procedure used is described and the spatial distributions of the 10 landcover classes determined are listed.