Vegetation Change Analysis User's Manual

Abstract

Approximately 70 percent of all U.S. military training lands are located in arid and semi-arid areas. Training activities in such areas frequently adversely affect vegetation, damaging plants and reducing the resilience of vegetation to recover once disturbed. Fugitive dust resulting from a loss of vegetation creates additional problems for human health, increasing accidents due to decreased visibility, and increasing maintenance costs for roads, vehicles, and equipment. Diagnostic techniques are needed to identify thresholds of sustainable military use. A cooperative effort among U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Defense, and selected university scientists was undertaken to focus on developing new techniques for monitoring and mitigating military impacts in arid lands. This manual focuses on the development of new monitoring techniques that have been implemented at Fort Irwin, California. New mitigation techniques are described in a separate companion manual. This User's Manual is designed to address diagnostic capabilities needed to distinguish between various degrees of sustainable and nonsustainable impacts due to military training and testing and habitat-disturbing activities in desert ecosystems. Techniques described here focus on the use of high-resolution imagery and the application of image-processing techniques developed primarily for medical research. A discussion is provided about the measurement of plant biomass and shrub canopy cover in arid. lands using conventional methods. Both semiquantitative methods and quantitative methods are discussed and reference to current literature is provided. A background about the use of digital imagery to measure vegetation is presented.