Assessment of Cumulative Training Impacts for Sustainable Military Land Carrying Capacity and Environment: Quantifying Quality of Environment and Landscape.

The U.S. Army is responsible for more than 30 million acres of land management across 5,500 different sites. Training exercises on these sites cause degradation of environment and fragmentation of landscape. The degraded environment will limit training capabilities of the Army.  It is thus necessary to evaluate the environmental quality for environmental health reasons as well as the Army training purposes. The objective of this project is to develop a methodology to comprehensively quantify the quality and dynamics of landscape and environment based on spatial multicriteria analysis that integrates multiple factors that influence the environmental and landscape quality. This presentation will demonstrate the methods used and results for landscape segmentation and quantification of fragmentation for Fort Riley. For landscape segmentation, Landsat Thematic Mapper ™ and India Remote Sensing images are used. Moreover, the effects of variable spatial resolutions on segmentation are investigated and principal component analysis and Brovey Transformation of the images are conducted. In addition, various spatial metrics, such as patch density and perimeter, percentage of landscape, interspersion and juxtaposition index, etc., are compared to measure the degree of landscape fragmentation. These results together with other data layers such as soil erosion map will be input into the spatial multicriteria analysis procedure where an comprehensive indicator that quantify the quality of environment and landscape is derived.