holmes (HERO object-based Lawn Mapping Exploration of Suburbia) is a subgroup of the HERO project which conducts .45 meter resolution mapping of the Plum Island Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research Site.

It was created in September 2006, when two geography professors at Clark University (Colin Polsky and Gil Pontius) recognized the need for a high-resolution dataset to foster collaborative research with two ecologists (Chuck Hopkinson and Wil Wollheim). That discussion formed the basis for a successful, $1.4M grant proposal to NSF’s Coupled Natural-Human Systems competition, submitted in November 2006 and awarded in May 2007. This project uses the premise described above about suburbanization to examine social dynamics, ecological dynamics, and coupled socio-ecological dynamics.

For more info see: The George Perkins Marsh Institute (GPMI) Working Paper, 2012-24: HERO Object-based Lawn Mapping Exploration of Suburbia: Rationale, Methods and Results for the NSF Plum Island Ecosystems Long-Term Ecological Research Site [pdf].
Colin Polsky, Robert Gilmore Pontius, Jr., Nicholas M. Giner, Albert Decatur, Daniel Miller Runfola, and Rahul Rakshit, Clark University, December 2012.

2005 Land Cover Data, downloadable by town:

Other study area data

Boundaries
Available for all towns in study area (Vector File), and for individual towns:

Land Use (vector files)

Zoning (vector files)

Census (vector files)

Parcels (vector files)