Impervious cover change as an indicator of environmental equity

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.