mY MAPS FOR 1999 AND 2018

134-142 Loomis Street

cALCULATIONS

Discussion

From analyzing the land use changes of 134 through 142 Loomis Street betweeen 1999 and 2018, I noticed that not too much had changed over the 19 years. One change that I did notice was there are more paved surfaces in 2018 than in 1999. It seemed that a couple of the houses added paved walkways to their front doors. The first house on the left (134) extended their paved driveway. The last house on the right (143) also made their driveway bigger in the back of the house. These changes may be small but they do impact run off and infiltration rates. Looking at the calculations above, I can see that 1999 (less pavement), had less run off, which means a higher infiltration rate because there was more green space to take in excess water. On the same thought, I can see that 2018 had higher run off rates because there is less green space for infiltration. If these run off rates are compared to 1600CE where the land use is fully forested, we can see that 1600 CE has the lowest run off rates. This makes sense because there were no buildings or paved surfaces in 1600CE.

The buildings themselves did not seem to change at all in the 19 years. The same sheds/garages are seen in both images. This resulted in the same building area percentage for 1999 and 2018. The overall area of all five houses did not seem to change at all so I kept them the same for both periods in time. The 1999 image was extremely hard to analyze becuase of the image quality but I think I was able to map the sites correctly.

Speculations

As we have been talking about previously, run off has a huge impact on water quality, especially when it comes to Lake Champlain. A lot of land use change in the communities near UVM for the past couple of decades has been from green space (cleared or forested) to either paved surfaces or buildings. Just from my 5 houses that I looked at above, I saw a difference in run off just from small changes in driveways. The more runoff that ends up in Lake Champlain, the worse the water quality is. This runoff can contain excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which then ends up in water bodies and lowers water quality. Lake Champlain already has a huge overload of phosphourus causing algea blooms every summer.