NODC Standard Product: C-CAP Coastal Change Analysis Project - St. Croix estuary region (1985 - 1992) (NCEI Accession 0090142)

The Coastal Change Analysis Project St. Croix Estuary Region CD-ROM data set uses Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery from 1985 to 1992 to provide a regional change analysis of the St. Croix Estuary and Passamaquoddy Bay in Maine and Canada. This project was a cooperative effort involving the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Gulf of Maine Program and Environment Canada. The CD-ROM was produced with the cooperation of the NOAA Coastal Ocean Program's Estuarine Habitat Studies Program, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Oceanographic Data Center, and the National Geophysical Data Center.

Steady increases in coastal development bring with it non-point source pollution, erosion and other environmental threats. In an effort to improve our understanding of these changes, the C-CAP program has strive to develop a nationally accepted standard protocol for monitoring land cover and habitat changes for coastal regions of the U.S. The St. Croix Estuary is the second release in this series of CD-ROM datasets. Historically valuable as a habitat for salmon, this area is now threatened by changes from the large Maine and Canadian forestry industries. Understanding where and how these changes are occurring is important for sound resource management decisions.

The St. Croix Estuary product consists of three parts: (1) a 1985 land cover analysis, (2) a 1992 land cover analysis, and (3) a land cover change detection analysis, all in binary raster format. These data are in Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system and are not explicitly georeferenced, but can be by using a Geographical Information System (GIS). Each of the three components has 4212 pixels per row, and 3821 rows, for a total of nearly 16 megabytes in each data file. Brief documentation for each product is in separate files, for example, STCRX85.HED, and in the appendices; the geospatial metadata are contained in files .MTA; and a TIFF copy of the images are in files .TIF. The generic binary raster data are in files *.BIN.