Landscape patterns as indicators of ecological change at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA

This research examined landscape indicators that signal ecological change in both intensely used and lightly used lands at Fort Benning, Georgia. Changes in patterns of land cover through time affect the ecological system by altering the proportion and distribution of habitats for species that these cover types support. Landscape patterns, therefore, are important indicators of land-use impacts, past and present, upon the landscape. This analysis of landscape pattern began with a landscape characterization based on witness tree data from 1827 and the 1830s and remotely sensed data from 1974, 1983, 1991, and 1999. The data from the early 1800s, although coarse, were useful in characterizing the historical range of variability in ecological conditions for the area. The steps for the analysis involved the creation of a land-cover database and a time series of land-cover maps, computation of landscape metrics, and evaluation of changes in those metrics over time as evidenced in the land-cover maps. We focused on five cover types (bare/developed land, deciduous forest, mixed forest, pine forest, and non-forest vegetated land), for they reveal information important to resources management at Fort Benning. An examination of land-cover class and landscape metrics, computed from the maps, indicated that a suite of metrics adequately describes the changing landscape at Fort Benning, Georgia. The most appropriate metrics were percent cover, total edge (km), number of patches, descriptors of patch area, nearest neighbor distance, the mean perimeter-to-area ratio, shape range, and clumpiness. Identification of such ecological indicators is an important component of building an effective environmental monitoring system.