Honoring Scientific Research by Jerry Ritchie: Fifteen Years of Monitoring Vegetation Changes at the Jornada Experimental Range and the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge.

The New Mexico rangeland research sites at Jornada and Sevilleta have been valuable sites for studying long term changes in vegetation cover for North American semi-arid rangeland and for assessing the impacts of land use and climate change upon the health of grazing lands. Monitoring at these sites, begun over  80 years ago, has been intensively evaluated since 1995 with semi-annual remote sensing-based experimental campaigns. For the last 15 years Dr. Jerry Ritchie has played a key role verifying vegetation cover and evaluating new ways to map cover changes through surface roughness observations. In honor of Dr. Ritchie’s work, changes in vegetation patterns, and their relevance, will be presented.