Imperviousness: Tampa Bay Study

Home | Tampa Bay Study | Data | Task 1: Mapping - Imperviousness

Contact: Michael P Crane
USGS Eros Data Center, 47914 252nd Street, Sioux Falls, South Dakota 57198-9801

Urban development has expanded rapidly in the Tampa Bay area of west-central Florida over the past century. A major effect associated with this population trend is the transformation of the landscape from natural cover types to impervious urban land. This research utilizes an innovative approach for mapping urban extent and its changes through determining impervious surfaces from Landsat satellite remote sensing data. Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed the satellite data for four time periods (1991, 1995, 2000, and 2002) to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of urban growth in the Tampa Bay watershed.

Results of this study also show that the impervious surface area increases approximately three-fold from 1991-2002. By 2002, areas with imperviousness greater than 10% accounted for approximately 1800 km, or 27% of the total watershed area. In the map images below, note the increase in yellow/orange/red pixels (areas with greater than 50% imperviousness), as well as the increase in the extent of urbanized area.

The resulting imperviousness data are used with a defined suite of geospatial data sets to simulate historical urban development and predict future urban and suburban extent, density, and growth patterns using SLEUTH modeling. Also examined is the increasingly important influence that urbanization and its associated imperviousness extent have on the individual drainage basins of the Tampa Bay watershed. Scientists and managers can utilize these conclusions to aid in sustainable urban planning, examine urban growth against other environmental parameters such as water quality or wildlife studies, or as influencial parameters in hydrologic modeling.

Links to Tampa Bay imperviousness data:

Percent imperviousness for the Tampa Bay watershed: 1991 - 1995 - 2000 - 2002 (Metadata)

These data sets are in ArcGIS Shapefile format. To view these files, you must have ESRI ArcGIS Software or other GIS software. A freely available lightweight version of ESRI's software is ArcExplorer.

Impervious surface area of Tampa Bay Area: 1991 - 2006

Select a map to open an enlargement. Viewing impervious data in the Tampa Bay Interactive Mapping System (IMS), will allow you to zoom in to selected areas.

Related Links:

Gulf of Mexico Integrated Science - Tampa Bay Study - Watershed and Estuary Mapping (USGS Open-File Report 2005-1014, January 2005), Author: Mark Hansen
Tampa Bay Bathymetry - Lidar
Tampa Bay Bathymetry - Sonar
Tampa Bay Remote Sensing Imagery

Refereed Publications:

Xian, G. and M. Crane. 2005. Assessments of urban growth in the Tampa Bay watershed using remote sensing data. Remote Sensing of the Environment 97: 203-215.

Xian, G., and M. Crane. 2006. An analysis of urban thermal characteristics and associated land cover in Tampa bay and Las Vegas using satellite data. Remote Sensing of Environment 104: 147-156.

Xian, G., M. Crane, and D. Steinwand. 2005. Dynamic modeling of Tampa Bay urban development using parallel computing, Computers & Geosciences 31: 920-928.

Crane, M., and G. Xian. 2006. Urban growth and seagrass distribution trends in Tampa Bay, Florida. In Rates, Trends, Causes, and Consequences of Urban Land-Use Change in the United States, USGS Professional Paper 1726: 185-188.

Xian, G. and M. Crane. In press. An analysis of urban development and its environmental impact on the Tampa Bay watershed. Journal of Environmental Management.