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Special Issue of International Journal of Remote Sensing Focuses on Unique STAR Program: EaGLe
The December 2005 edition of the International Journal of Remote Sensing (2005 International J. of Remote Sensing, 26, #23), highlights the remote sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS) research conducted by scientists from EPA's Estuarine and Great Lakes (EaGLe) program. The remote sensing component of this program was in part supported through a partnership with NASA. EaGLe grantee, Dr. Xiaojun Yang, served as guest editor for this special issue.
The goal of the EaGLe program was to identify, develop and evaluate new integrative indicators of ecological condition, test their applicability across regions, and ultimately incorporate them into long-term monitoring programs. These integrated indicators are needed if resource agencies are to know whether management practices are indeed improving the quality of the entire coastal system.
Five EaGLe research grants cover the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Lakes. The programs are:
- Atlantic Coast Environmental Indicators Consortium
- Atlantic Slope Consortium
- Great Lakes Environmental Indicators Project
- Pacific Estuarine Ecosystem Indicator Research (PEEIR) Consortium
- Consortium for Estuarine Ecoindicator Research for the Gulf of Mexico
Remote sensing and GIS techniques, because of their cost-effectiveness and technological soundness, are used increasingly to support the environmental monitoring and assessment of estuarine ecosystems at local, regional and global scales. As documented in the special issue, the remote sensing component of the EaGLe program is making significant contributions to advancing indicator development at the ecosystem level. EaGLe researchers have made particular progress in four major areas - remote sensing of coastal water quality, submergent aquatic vegetation mapping, coastal marsh characterization, and watershed landscape pattern analysis. The papers included in this special issue span a range of diverse estuarine and coastal ecosystems in the United States, using a wide range of image processing and GIS technologies and remotely sensed data from both airborne and space-borne platforms. Included in the special issue are articles describing efforts to map Florida using satellite data, marshland vegetation in California using hyperspectral data, estimate and mapping chlorophyll-a concentration in Pensacola Bay, and quantify landscape patterns and its changes in an estuarine watershed using satellite imagery.
To learn more about EPA's EaGLes program, visit the Web page at: http://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/outlinks.centers/centerGroup/8.