Connecticut's Changing Landscape

Visit the CCL website.

Connecticut's landscape is changing. The natural forested land of the Northeast, almost completely converted to farmland only a hundred years ago, is now undergoing a transformation to an urban/suburban landscape. With these changes come a number of concerns about the environmental, social and economic impacts of development, some of which have become the subject of intense debate across the state. Connecticut's Changing Landscape, a project under development at UConn for the past two years, is an attempt to bring research-based information and education to these debates.

HOW, exactly, is our landscape changing? The UConn Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR) has made use of cutting-edge remote sensing techniques to provide data about how our landscape has changed since 1985, with a special emphasis on the growth of developed land.

The CCL website includes:

  • An overview of Connecticut's coastal area land cover characterization
  • Coastal land cover and land cover change statistics
  • Local watershed statistics
  • Detailed land cover characterization methodology and sample results
  • Town-by-town maps and statistics.