Green Infrastructure

Green infrastructure lands are characterized as those that provide infiltration, capture, and uptake of moisture and nutrients with the potential to retain more than they lose. COG’s Green Infrastructure Program examines regional green space and open space land cover types from urban pocket parks to urban agriculture; from small forest plots to large forestlands, meadow and farmland tracts. 

The program produced the first comprehensive regional green infrastructure land cover maps in 2004 using 1999/2000 Landsat imagery.  More recent products include high resolution land cover maps in 2013—using 2011 imagery for a subregion of the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland and Virginia—which demonstrate change in land cover over the eleven to twelve year period.