The Submerged Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) program at William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (VIMS) has created a Google Maps mashup to visualize and track bay grass restoration efforts with data from ESRI’s ArcGIS Server. These grasses are a vital resource to improve water quality, biodiversity and to stem soil erosion. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has set an ambitious goal of restoring underwater grasses to 185,000 acres of the Bay by 2015.
This mashup has some impressive features that allow you to view the overall region as well as the health of specific zones, with a temporal component that tracks health from 1970 to the present. There are links in the right-hand menu file to tabular reports, and the ability to download data.
