This is a personal project I started to develop my skills in using R to analyze spatial data.

Growing up at the edge of the Pinelands National Reserve, I developed a fondness and curiosity for the Atlantic coastal pine barrens ecoregion. Despite being commonly referred to as the Pine Barrens, this ecosystem is rich in biodiversity and home to many unique fire-adapted species. As I explored data available through the New Jersey Geographic Information Network (NJGIN) Open Data Portal, I came across several datasets that inspired me to develop a project analyzing land cover change within the Pine Barrens ecoregion, specifically assessing land cover change over time and between legislative boundaries. The Pinelands National Reserve (PNR) was established as the first National Reserve by Congress in 1978. The New Jersey Pinelands Commission is an independent state agency dedicated to preserving and protecting the state-designated Pinelands Area. Although there is significant overlap between the boundaries of the PNR and the Pinelands Area, there are small portions of federally-designated PNR land that fall outside of the state's Pinelands Area where the Pinelands Commission has limited regulatory jurisdiction. There are also portions of the Pinelands Area that the 1978 federal act did not include. Additionally, New Jersey's Pinelands Protection Act of 1979 created a further distinction within the Pinelands Area: the Preservation Area. Development is to be highly regulated in this interior-most area, which accounts for about 39% of the total Pinelands Area. The rest of the Pinelands Area was designated as the Protection Area, where there are less stringent restrictions on land use and development. For this project, I analyzed land cover change from 2013 to 2023 within the Pinelands National Reserve and Pinelands Area and compared areas that are outside of the overlapping federal and state-designated boundaries to areas within the overlap. I also used data documenting threatened and endangered species habitat within the Pinelands to provide more context on what areas of the ecoregion are of higher priority for wildlife conservation.

I accessed the following datasets from NJGIN Open Data:

• State Boundary of NJ, 3424 (NJOGIS)

• Pinelands National Reserve (NJ Pinelands Commission)

• Pinelands Protection Act 1979 (NJ Pinelands Commission)

• Landscape Project v3.3 (NJDEP)

I used land cover data for 2013 and 2023 from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD).

This is an ongoing project. I have currently processed all boundaries being analyzed, which included subsetting the Pinelands Protection Act data for the Preservation Area and Protection Area boundaries, as well as finding the intersections and differences between the multiple legislative boundaries and the endangered and threatened species habitat. I have also clipped and masked the NLCD raster data to each boundary and intersection/difference.

My next steps will be to summarize the data, calculate area and percentage land cover change across years and defined zones, and conduct statistical analyses to identify patterns in land cover change. Depending on what specific question(s) I would like to answer, I may use the Chi-Square Test of Independence, ANOVA, and/or logistic regression.