It is hard to imagine that those woods, so integral a feature of the New England fabric, could ever just disappear. But talk with folks who have lived in these communities for many years and they will tell you land development is out of control, gobbling up forests at an unprecedented rate.

Can it be true? One person who would know is Jana Butts. As senior planner for the Windham Region Council of Governments (WINCOG), a consortium of 10 northeast Connecticut towns that have banded together to address mutual interests, Butts needs accurate land use data to help guide local development. And the most reliable source of those data, she will tell you, is the University of Connecticut’s Center for Land Use Education and Research. CLEAR, as it is generally known, helps land use decision makers balance growth and natural resource protection by providing information, education and assistance.

Emily Wilson, an expert in geographic information systems; Jim Gibbons, UConn extension land use educator; and Chet Arnold, associate director of the Center for Land Use Education and Research, review photos and maps in the CLEAR office.

“Land cover in Connecticut is certainly changing, but we still have a lot of trees,” Butts says, noting that in 2002, forests covered 65 percent of the land in the WINCOG region. However, she will also tell you the picture is not entirely sanguine, because 17 years earlier, in 1985, 69 percent of the WINCOG land was wooded. The loss is just four percentage points, says Butts, but it amounts to some 7,868 acres, or an area more than nine times the size of Central Park in New York City. And the WINCOG forests are still vanishing.

What is happening in the WINCOG towns is representative of the entire state. Generally thought of as “sprawl,” it is a trend dramatically borne out by the findings of Connecticut’s Changing Landscape, a two-year CLEAR study, the first phase of which was released in 2004. The study boldly exemplifies the state-of-the-art science on which CLEAR is founded. The Center’s insight into Connecticut’s landscape, and its training and education programs, begin with remote sensing research from which aerial and satellite imagery are interpreted using sophisticated landscape analysis tools, many of which have been developed at CLEAR. Remote sensing is the science of gathering information about Earth’s surface from a distance using devices such as cameras, multi-spectral scanners and radar.

Using satellite-based remote sensing, UConn scientists at CLEAR painstakingly compared the state’s land cover as it was in 1985 and as it had changed by 1990, 1995 and 2002. During that 17-year period, they found, Connecticut lost 170 square miles of forest, an average of 18 acres per day. At the same time, high-density urban cover expanded by 119 square miles.

Of course, the relentless reconfiguration of the land has occurred as long as there have been humans. But the “man on the street” opinion is that it is happening much faster. Sprawl, many Connecticut residents believe, is out of control and threatening the state’s storied quality of life.

That perspective has some validity, says Chet Arnold, associate director of CLEAR, but the matter is more complicated. “Some level of development is necessary,” he says. “People tend to define sprawl in a very personal way, as development in a place that they don’t care to see it. Suppose a project is carefully designed to efficiently utilize space with minimum impact on local resources. Would that qualify as sprawl? Maybe it’s the epitome of smart growth. Just because a development is new, it’s not automatically bad.”

Whether a development project qualifies as smart growth or sprawl depends almost entirely upon local standards. Land use policies and decisions are nearly always made by elected or appointed officials. “The cumulative impact of the case-by-case decisions made every night in town halls across the country is what determines the look, feel and functionality of America’s landscape,” says Arnold. To make those critical decisions, local officials need reliable and accurate information. And that’s what CLEAR is all about.

The first statewide land use inventory was conducted in 1990 by Landsat, the NASA satellite used to remotely image and evaluate the Earth’s surface. Encouraged by the quality of the Landsat information, Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials (NEMO) was founded as a program within CLEAR the next year by Arnold; Jim Gibbons, UConn extension land use educator; and Dan Civco, UConn professor of geomatics and the director of CLEAR.

NEMO is a collaborative effort among UConn’s department of natural resources management and engineering and cooperative extension system, two units of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and the Connecticut Sea Grant College Program. It has been helping local land use officials to understand the relationship between land use and water resource protection ever since. More than two-thirds of Connecticut’s 169 towns and cities have benefited from NEMO’s resources and its staff conducts some 150 educational workshops annually.

NEMO quickly became a national model, spawning a successful network that has funded projects in 29 states. Meanwhile, rapidly evolving technology opened up a host of new ways for Civco, Arnold and their associates to aid land use planners.

“There’s been an absolute explosion in high resolution imagery in the past few years,” says Civco. “Private industry is now producing data that are of military reconnaissance quality. At the same time, more and more municipalities have equipped themselves with the necessary geographic information systems (GIS) technology to use this information. When we started NEMO, only two Connecticut municipalities were using GIS.”

In 2002, CLEAR was born of those technological advances and two years later, many municipal officials are repeat customers. Old Saybrook Town Planner Christine Nelson, for instance, recalls her first contact with NEMO.“I came across the Web site and I was astounded,” she says. “It’s a treasure trove of useful information.”

Since 1999, she has collaborated repeatedly with the NEMO/CLEAR team. With their help, Old Saybrook has carefully inventoried all its important natural resources and developed new policies that regulate building sizes and impervious surfaces, such as asphalt parking lots and highways, that can impact storm water runoff.

Emily Wilson reviews maps on a computer at the CLEAR office.

But Civco and Arnold note that although municipal officials are the primary target audience of CLEAR, they are not the only one. CLEAR provides scientifically accurate information to any group or individual in Connecticut needing planning information. A developer, for instance, might want information on low impact development techniques or assistance educating decision makers in towns where he or she wishes to build. Or a lake authority might want information about how to reduce the impact of development.

“Our goal is to provide useful and understandable research-based information to whomever needs it,” says Arnold. “In fact, the first two organizations that requested information from our Web site were the Home Builders Association of Connecticut and the Connecticut chapter of The Nature Conservancy.”

Since Connecticut’s Changing Landscape began, the findings have been downloaded from the CLEAR Web site more than 200 times. And the CLEAR staff has made presentations to an extraordinary range of organizations, including governmental agencies, public land trusts, builders groups, high schools, colleges, and environmental groups.

“CLEAR is extremely helpful,” says Bill Ethier, executive director of the Home Builders Association of Connecticut. “No one else is providing this kind of information. We want to get beyond simplistic stereotypes and focus on responsible development that preserves land appropriately. CLEAR helps us cut through the hyperbole with science and facts.”

In the next several years, the CLEAR team will be building on the Changing Landscape project, using sophisticated modeling to tease additional insight out of the data on topics such as forest fragmentation, urban growth patterns and the spread of invasive plant species.   Much of this work will be in partnership with NASA, which recently made a major grant to CLEAR.  

“We’ll be moving from the ‘how much change’ phase into a more qualitative phase that will help us to understand just what the implications of these changes are for our communities and our environment,” says Civco.  

Adds Arnold, “As always, we will spend a lot of time and energy creating value-added access to our data for the citizens of Connecticut, through our technical tools and educational programs.”

For more about CLEAR and NEMO, visit their Web sites: http://clear.uconn.edu and http://nemo.uconn.edu.

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