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Background Maps & Data Research Applications Outreach welctrne Publications Contact Us News Page 1 of 2 Background NAUTILUS represents the next logical step in the evolution of a successful partnership that has been fulfilling the basic goals of the RESAC initiative since 1992. The Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials (NEMO) Project and the Laboratory for Earth Resources Information Systems (LERIS) - two efforts of the College of Agriculture an. d Natural Resources at the University of Connecticut -- have been collaborating on a series of projects that have applied RS, GIS, and other geospatial information and tools to real -world natural resource management problems. Here's a brief look back at our earlier (and in many cases ongoing) work that led up to NAUTILUS: 1991: The NEMO /LERIS collaboration began when Cooperative Extension land use and water quality specialists saw the educational potential of a new land use /land cover RS data set developed by LERIS (to estimate nitrogen Toads to Long Island Sound). After extensive discussions with the LERIS Director, NEMO was developed around the idea of using land use /land cover data to better inform local decision makers about the land use /water quality connection. NEMO places particular emphasis on impervious cover as an indicator of the impact of development on water resources, and has been a national leader in the use of this indicator (Arnold and Gibbons, 1996). 1994: Cooperative Extension (working with The Nature Conservancy and U.S. EPA New England) began a series of successful watershed projects that served to stimulate a second LERIS /NEMO collaboration. The subbasins of the lower Connecticut River are largely forested, making forest management and sprawl- generated forest fragmentation key issues for the watershed communities. At the same time, LERIS was working on a land use /land cover analysis that would differentiate between forest community types. LERIS was able to pilot and field check their research in the watersheds that NEMO was working in; CES foresters were then able to use that information for analysis and education of forest owners and municipal officials within the watershed towns. 1997 -8: Over the past year, NEMO and LERIS have collaborated on making geospatial data available to land use decision makers and planners statewide. LERIS had obtained a state grant to update and improve the 1990 -91 land use /land cover database, with an emphasis on improved discrimination between urban and suburban land covers. This data set, created by fusing TM and SPOT panchromatic data, was completed this spring. Another part of the research, devised in collaboration with the NEMO team, was to create a more accurate impervious land cover data layer using neural network technology; this work is still ongoing. http: / /www.resac. uconn. edu /welcome/background /index.html 8/22/01