Military installments are import assets for the proper training of armed forces. To ensure the continued viability of the training grounds, management practices need to be implemented to sustain the necessary environmental conditions for safe and effective training. This analysis uses satellite imagery over time to gain insight into vegetation conditions over a large military installment.

MODIS imagery was collected multiple times a year for 11 years at Smoky Hill Air National Guard Range (Smoky Hill ANGR) and a comparison site in Kansas. NDVI was extracted within ArcView using an Avenue extension and analyzed within R using the statistical package bfast. Vegetation trends and disturbances were gathered from the bfast analysis. It was found that Smoky Hill ANGR has more disturbances in vegetation than the comparison site, but has a higher percentage of positive vegetation trends.

Burning is a common management practice where Smoky Hill ANGR is located. To determine if burning could be a viable cause of the vegetation disturbances at Smoky Hill ANGR a burn analysis was done. A combination of Landsat 5 TM and 7 ETM+ imagery was used over the same 11 years and a burn algorithm was run on the imagery. It was found that Smoky Hill is burned more regularly than the comparison site. Based on the findings of the trend and burn analysis more research needs to be done to determine if the burning explains all of the vegetation disturbances or if the military training is influencing the vegetation conditions at Smoky Hill ANGR.