Future Stability of U.S. High Plains Land Use

Blowout in a Milo field in Baca County, Colorado Tires placed on sand dune near Logan, New Mexico in an attempt to stabilize the dune.

Researchers

Alexander F. H. Goetz - Science Team Leader
Leanne Lestak - GIS Project Manager
Eric Johnson - GIS Technician
Amanda Warner - Graduate Student
Ethan Gutmann - Graduate Student
Pete McIntosh - Masters Graduate
Peter Gimeno - Undergraduate Student

Project Description

The High Plains extend from South Dakota to Texas and include parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming and New Mexico. Land cover in this region is susceptible to both human land-use and climate-induced land cover change because it is semi-arid, with less than 500 mm of yearly rainfall, and in many areas must be irrigated to produce crops. Over 100,000 km of this region contains stabilized sand dunes and sand sheets (photos on right) created and reactivated at least four times during the last 10,000 years It appears that natural climate variability during the ascendancy of human civilization caused greater land-cover change than took place during human settlement in the last 150 years. The High Plains are still subject to change by climate factors as well as economically driven change that might exacerbate the phenomena. This research sets out to identify areas of potential landscape instability based on vegetation cover change expected, both in type and quantity. The tools used are multi-year remote sensing from Landsat TM and GIS which is used to store and plot ancillary data such as historical drought, precipitation, winds, soils, surficial geology, topography and crop statistics and provide the ability to model change and change potential.

Project Goals

• To develop a validated, model-based method for assessing future climate and human-induced land-cover change over the U.S. High Plains.
• To apply this new assessment capability to estimate the potential for future land cover change.
• To integrate physically-based assessment process with land-use decision making process to help reduce negative socio-economic impact of future climatic change.