Student Research Reports

View Research Report

Protected areas, such as federal preserves and national parks, are often thought to be ecologically healthier than unprotected areas, but this might not actually be the truth in some cases. Protected land is often large and unmanageable, especially due to recent national park unemployment rates and cuts in funding for nature preserves nationwide. Unprotected land, on the other hand, typically features new environmentally friendly developments such as landscaping and green infrastructure. So this raises the question: “What are the land cover trends and environmental quality changes over time when comparing protected and unprotected areas across different locations?” The majority of our team lives in suburban areas, areas that as shown on Earth Map’s Dynamic World layer, are over 50% built-up; so, with our local knowledge of our AOI's that came from collecting land cover data using GLOBE observer, we wanted to research just how different our AOI’s were in terms of ecosystem health from similar protected areas. As Protection Pioneers, our research is dedicated to studying the ecosystem health, in terms of terms of plant and soil water loss, which indicates more vegetation(ET), land surface temperature(LST), photosynthesis and plant growth(GPP), and the measurement of how healthy vegetation is in an area(NDVI), of protected and unprotected areas from 2002-2022 using a coded analysis tool that will compare the metrics of the unprotected areas we live in and protected areas with similar environmental conditions like similar temperatures, elevation, and precipitation. The tool then generates downloadable line graphs comparing environmental quality metrics between the AOI and its best-matched protected site. From the research we have already done, we have found that there are distinct differences between areas of protected and unprotected land from our definition of ecosystem health, like higher plant productivity(GPP), higher averages of vegetation health(NDVI), lower land surface temperatures(LST), and more water loss(ET). In the future, we as a team hope to expand our research by collecting data at other AOIs near us. As the land cover in the United States is ever-evolving, it is important to continue monitoring the changes underway so that we can use research like ours to create healthy environments anywhere.