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. 2024 Aug:35:101247.
doi: 10.1016/j.rsase.2024.101247.

Impervious cover change as an indicator of environmental equity

M Culler  1 , J Wickham  2 , M Nash  3 , M T Clement  4
Affiliations

Impervious cover change as an indicator of environmental equity

M Culler et al. Remote Sens Appl. 2024 Aug.

Abstract

Pattern-focused environmental equity research has been underpinned by high-resolution remotely sensed data to uncover spatial relationships between environmental amenities (e.g., urban tree cover) and socio-economic status (SES). A constraint imposed by reliance on high-resolution data is the inability to examine temporal patterns, primarily because of the cost of data production and the nascent state of high-resolution land cover mapping. The lack of temporal monitoring is a clear gap in pattern-focused environmental equity research. We examined temporal (2001 - 2019) relationships between a disamenity, impervious cover (IC), and demographic attributes for the entirety of the conterminous United States. Our main finding was 2001 - 2019 increases in IC were more pervasive in minority communities but these communities were not necessarily poor, and only rarely poorly educated or non-English speaking. We supported our use of IC from moderate resolution data by comparing it to high-resolution data for 24 cities within the conterminous United States. Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) was 4.8% overall, ranging from 2.2% to 11.3% across the 24 locations. Differences in classification objectives contributed to differences in %IC estimates between the two sources.

Keywords: Adaptive management; Environmental justice; Impervious cover; Land cover change; NLCD.

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Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Locations of high-resolution land cover data
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Proportion of CGB for which demographic attributes were ≥ 25% by NLCD2019 %IC decile class1. 1 lower limit=inclusive
Figure 3:
Figure 3:
Proportion of CGB for which demographic attributes were ≥ 25% by 2001 – 2019 %IC change class1. 1 p50M and P50LI are %IC change per-class Medians for minority (M) and Low Income (LI). The demographic attributes under 5 and over 64 years old had low proportions (≤ 5%) across all %IC change classes.
Figure 4:
Figure 4:
Location of CBG for which %IC change was ≥ 30% and percentage minority was < 25% (●) or ≥ 25% (●). The dashed line marks the eastern boundary of the 11 western states.
Figure 5:
Figure 5:
Proportion of CBG for which demographic attributes were ≥ 25% by location-specific surface temperature deciles.
Figure 6:
Figure 6:
Proportion CBG for which minority or low income was ≥ 25% by resolution of IC data
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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