St. Tammany Parish has a choice in how it confronts inevitable growth: It can allow continued suburban sprawl, eating up more and more of the rural land that attracted many residents to the parish, or it can create centers where people can live, work and play in a relatively small area, a panel of experts from the Urban Land Institute said at a public meeting. The panelists called the latter approach the 'village in the woods' pattern - one that could create the equivalent of 25 Covington-like centers - and urged parish leaders to embrace it.

St. Tammany Parish has roughly 22,500 more people living there than it did eight years ago. And people continue to move into the parish. That latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates show St. Tammany's population was up 1.4 percent in July 2017 compared with the year prior. Last year was the seventh consecutive year of population growth for the parish. Much of that growth is thanks to new residents who continue to move into St. Tammany at a healthy clip.

Welcome to the St. Tammany Parish Assessor's Office geographic information system (GIS). Assessor Louis Fitzmorris is pleased to provide this valuable data to all parish taxing bodies and to the public. Creating this data and maintaining it for the citizens of St. Tammany is important work and benefits all in our parish. Our progress is updated here regularly as we continue to add more parcels and further our advancements in our GIS.

In 2004, the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami invigorated the Sri Lankan government and people to turn their attention to restoring the country's mangrove stands to prevent such catastrophic damage from future disasters. It has an area of approximately square 65,610km with a coastline of about 1,620km on the Indian Ocean. Mangrove restoration projects were launched in Sri Lanka covering over 2,000 hectares. However, over 80% of these projects failed. Kondikara et al. 2017 conducted an assessment of the success of 23 mangrove restoration projects implemented following the 2004 tsunami.

The International Coastal Clean-up shows us that Texas, Idaho, Illinois and many of the urbanized mid-Atlantic states stand out as having particularly high debris loads, along with several states on the Gulf coast.

Social vulnerability refers to the resilience of communities when confronted by external stresses on human health, stresses such as natural or human-caused disasters, or disease outbreaks. CDC's Social Vulnerability Index uses 15 U.S. census variables at tract level to help local officials identify communities that may need support in preparing for hazards; or recovering from disaster.

St. Tammany Parish has spent decades engaged in the business of poorly guided development. The results: willy-nilly growth patterns, environmental degradation, traffic congestion, and a declining quality of life. Concerned with the consequences of inadequately controlled growth, the Parish is currently engaged in the New Directions 2025 comprehensive planning process. The process began with a vision to bring growth under control and preserve quality of life. But as time passes, that vision continues to disintegrate before citizens' very eyes.

The wetlands surrounding Delacroix, a fishing town to the southeast of New Orleans, were some of the hardest hit by the hurricane. Pounding surf, driving winds, and a potent storm surge transformed the marshes by picking apart mats of dead grass, stirring up and disbursing soft underlying sediments, scouring several new channels, and depositing leftover sediment and debris in new areas. This pair of false-color images shows the transformation. The Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5 acquired the top image a week before the storm hit.

Seagrass are flowering plants that live in the sea. There are many different kinds of seagrasses and some do not look like grass at all. Some of the shapes and sizes of leaves of different species of seagrass include an oval shape, a fern shape, a long spaghetti like leaf and a ribbon shape.

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