Assessment of Military Training Induced Impacts On Land Condition Recovery of Fort Riley Installation By Comparison With Konza Prairie Ecosystem.

Cumulative impacts of military training activities will trigger land degradation processes by disturbing ground and vegetation canopy cover, fragmenting landscapes, and increasing soil erosion. Degraded land will eventually limit military training activities and army readiness. The balance between the training activities and land condition recovery becomes important for sustainability of military land carrying capacity. Fort Riley and Konza Prairie are located in the Bluestem Prairie with similar characteristics of ecosystem but different land use history. It becomes very important to get an insight of the military training induced effects in the evolution of the Konza Prairie ecosystem. The objective of this study is to map the impacts of military training induced disturbances, their spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of Fort Riley installation; develop land condition indices; and enhance the understanding of the dynamics of land condition recovery. In this study, four seasonal Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper ™ images for each year from 1989 to 2010 were acquired and used to reproduce the spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of cumulative impacts due to military training. A soil erosion relevant cover factor was selected to measure the land condition. This factor was derived using linear spectral mixture analysis by calculating soil fraction and vegetation fraction images. Quantitative analysis of land condition recovery was conducted. A comparison of land condition between the Fort Riley installation and the Konza Prairie where no military training took place was made. Results showed that the time series of the image based cover factor maps reasonably quantified the cumulative impacts due to military training on land condition, and well revealed their spatial patterns and temporal dynamics. It was also found that there was a significant difference of the land condition between Fort Riley and Konza Prairie.

Key words: Image based cover factor, Konza Prairie, land condition recovery, Landsat TM, Military training