Going Further
Variations
Users are encouraged to choose another location of their own interest for further investigation of land use and wetland distribution.
As another alternative, one could examine land use types other than wetlands, such as forests or agricultural lands to see how these land cover types are distributed.
Other Data
Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) data is designed to work with a variety of data sets available from USGS and other sources. Digital elevation data (DEM) can be downloaded from the same WebGIS site and added to the map to assist in watershed planning.
Other Techniques
There are many approaches to the analysis of land use and land cover. For example, one could choose to analyze only the land use within a given distance of large cities, such as Jacksonville. Alternative styles of sub-setting and buffering can also be explored using this data.
Other Tools
Land Use and Land Cover and/or Wetlands data can be imported into any GIS and other visualization tools such as AEJEE and ArcGIS.
Land Use and Land Cover and/or Wetlands data are also available in Google Earth format (KMZ).
The data for these tools is available at North American Land Cover 2005 and National Wetlands Inventory.
Related Case Studies
In the Exploring Characteristics of Wetlands chapter students learn how to use the RAMSAR Wetlands Inventory database and conduct a global search of wetlands by characteristic. GIS and KMZ data is also available via this resource.
Other EET chapters that use My World GIS and/or other GIS software include the following:
How Cities Affect Their Local Climate—Explore the urban heat island effect using student collected surface temperature data. Subset large datasets, buffer others, examine spatial relationships, and gather statistics to investigate temperature differences in urban and rural school sites.
Detecting El Nino in Sea Surface Temperature Data—Create and analyze fifteen years of average SST maps to find El Niño and La Niño events.
Evidence for Plate Tectonics—Identify relationships among sea-floor age, earthquakes, and volcanoes to understand how they support the theory of plate tectonics.
Exploring Monsoon Precipitation and Streamflow in a Semi-Arid Watershed—Investigate the effect of summer thunderstorms on streamflow in a semi-arid watershed in Arizona.
Investigating Earthquakes with AEJEE—Download earthquake data from the USGS. Bring it into a GIS and analyze it to predict where the next big earthquake will occur on Earth.
Is Greenland Melting?—Explore map layers to examine annual melting and long-term changes of Greenland's ice sheet.
Looking into Earth with GIS—Examine seismic wave data in a GIS and analyze wave velocities to infer the depth of the crust-mantle boundary.
Mapping Local Data—Follow a study of Urban Heat Islands as an example of a map-based science research project.
Seeing the Forest for the Trees: What's in Your Woods?—Investigate forest biodiversity in Maine using a spreadsheet and My World GIS. Then consider the environmental factors that contribute to tree species diversity.
Tsunami Run-up Prediction for Seaside, Oregon with My World GIS—Download and examine global, historical tsunami run-up patterns. Acquire DEM contours and import them into My World GIS. Then visualize the potential sea-level rise that could occur during a tsunami run-up event near Seaside, Oregon.
