Modeling Long-Term Cumulative Soil Disturbance and Individual Training Event Impacts at Fort Riley, Kansas.

Including training, multiple anthropogenic activities take place on Army training lands concurrently, including, but not limited to, forestry operations, agricultural, and even recreational activities. Inevitably, this use leads to natural resource disturbance.   For example, the use of military vehicles, during training, results in soil disturbance and vegetation loss, with subsequent increases in soil erosion rates, sedimentation in streams, habitat degradation, and numerous other secondary and tertiary effects. Similarly, forestry activities such as timber harvest and prescribed burns can result in soil disturbance and/or loss of vegetation and similar, subsequent impacts to varying degrees.  Many organizations have considerable research on non-military impacts on land resources. However, the interaction between land uses is less commonly studied and none for military and non-military land use interactions.  Army land managers lack a basic understanding of how these activities, occurring in conjunction and over time, cumulatively interact with the environment and quality of training lands.  This presentation will discuss efforts to combine long-term modeling and tracking studies to determine disturbance patterns at Fort Riley, Kansas.