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	A multi agency project funded by US EPA's STAR Program

Land Use/Land Cover Change

Land use land cover (LULC) change is an indicator of changing human demographics, natural resource uses, agricultural technologies, economic priorities, and land tenure systems. Different land uses impose different environmental stresses on natural plant and animal communities, with consequent implications to water quality, climate, ecosystem goods and services, economic welfare, and human health (Gutman et al. 2004). This indicator has been identified by the SOLEC process as an important indicator (Wolter et al. 2006). For instance, the indicator described here can be used to fulfill indicators #7002, #7000, #8132, #8136, #8500, and possibly #7000 and #7006

This indicator can be considered both a pressure (stress) indicator as well as a state (response) indicator. LULC change in response to human activities and natural process in the landscape (e.g., state indicator). However, land use and land cover change becomes a stress to other biological community response and, hence, can best be considered a pressure or stress. The development of this indicator was developed to establish a baseline for comparison of LULC changes throughout the U.S. portion of the Great Lakes basin. A concerted effort is needed and is currently underway to standardize this indicator throughout the Great Lakes basin in both the U.S. and in Canada.

Methods

Use of both raw Landsat sensor data (1992 &2001) and existing, Landsat-based, thematic data from various state and federal sources were used to assemble and quantify LULC data for the U.S. portion of the Great Lakes watershed. Because of some incompatibilities among different temporal images of Landsat, a variety of adjustments were essential to achieve consistent imagery between the 1992 and 2001 data (see Wolter et al. 2006 for details).

Results

Of the total change that occurred between 1992 and 2001 (2.5 % of watershed area), salient transition categories included a 33.5 % increase in area of low-intensity development, a 7.5 % increase in road area, and a decrease of mature forest area by over 2.3 % – the largest LULC category and area of change within the watershed. More than half of the forest change that occurred involved transitions into early successional vegetation, and hence, will likely remain in forest production of some sort. However, nearly as much forest area was permanently converted to developed land. Likewise, agriculture land area lost over 50,000 more ha to development than forestland, much of which involved transitions into urban/suburban categories (Fig. 1).

Most of the concentration of new developments occurred near coastal areas of the Great Lakes (Fig. 2). For instance, over one third of wetland losses to development between 1992 and 2001 occurred within 10 km of a coastal area, and most of that area was within the nearest one km. This is a concern because Great Lakes coastal wetlands provide habitat for a wide variety of fauna, support plant communities adapted to water level extremes, and buffer land-lake exchanges of nutrients and other materials.

References

Gutman, G., Janetos, A., Justice, C., Moran, E., Mustard, J., Rindfuss, R., Skole, D. and Turner II, B.J. (eds.) 2004. Land Change Science: Observing, Monitoring, and Understanding Trajectories of Change on the Earth’s Surface. Kluwer Academic Publishers, New York, NY.

Wolter, P., C. Johnston, G.J. Niemi. 2006. Land use change in the U.S. Great Lakes basin 1992-2001. Journal of Great Lakes Research. In press