Monitoring Changes in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed

Landsat is a critical and invaluable tool for characterizing the landscape and mapping it over time. Landsat data provides a baseline of observations for science about how human activities on the land affect water quality, affect wildlife habitat, affect air quality. The satellite imagery covers the entire 64,000 square miles of the Chesapeake Bay watershed (spanning six states and the District of Columbia). Without it we wouldn't be able to really understand how sources of nutrients and sediment have changed and where they are in the Chesapeake Bay. The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. The narration in this video is by Peter Claggett, a research geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey's Eastern Geographic Science Center. He has worked at the Chesapeake Bay Program Office since 2002, where he leads the Land Data Team that conducts research on land change characterization, analysis, and modeling in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. The audio was adapted from a radio interview with EarthSky.org.