Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) incorporates environmental and sustainability considerations into a strategic decision-making processes, such as policy formulation and plan development. While SEA can be an excellent tool for sustainable development planning, the approach needs to incorporate the monitoring of land use change. The merging of Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) offers a fresh approach to SEA planning. This paper examines using free US national data such as Census, National Land Cover Data (NLCD), soils and hydrologic watersheds boundaries to identify land use change impacts on a regional level. The approach ties Landsat TM images imagery to the census data collection dates, and it uses GIS expert systems’ modeling to analyze biodiversity by watershed catalog units. The paper discusses the implications for decision support to aid planning at the drainage basin level for local, regional, and national monitoring. The author argues that SEA with GIS/Remote Sensing tools will be more sensitive to the real consequences of sprawl. The research explores land use changes by the exurbia development around the Greenville – Spartanburg Metropolitan Area. The area ranks as the fifth most sprawling area in the United States. The paper focuses on quantifying the land use change, and the impacts of sprawl by biodiversity and the percent of impervious surfaces in a watershed. The author’s research addresses the quantification of development impacts by using land cover data for change detection assessment. It is an important process in monitoring and managing ecosystems and urban development because it provides quantitative analysis of true environmental consequences.
Stephen Sperry is an Associate Professor in City and Regional Planning. His teaching emphasis is land use planning applications using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). With over 25 years of experience in GIS applications, he has been a pioneer in the industry. As a former Director of Strategic Planning at ERDAS, Inc., he worked with ESRI, Microsoft, and others. He led the development of the first raster/vector integration, the ERDAS/ArcInfo Live Link. He won many research grants including with NASA for Expert Systems Classifier and MapSheets, a desktop GIS that used Microsoft’s Excel for spatial analysis. He previously taught at The Ohio State University and received bachelor and master’s degrees in Landscape Architecture from SUNY, College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry at Syracuse University in 1970 and Harvard University in 1975.