Identifying and Understanding Land Use/land Cover Change in Kansas

Statewide land cover change detection analysis provides a useful tool for conservation planning and environmental monitoring and addresses issues of habitat fragmentation and urban sprawl. Furthermore, using historical and recent land cover data offers two perspectives on landscape dynamics. To this end, the first alliance level land cover map of Kansas recently completed by the KARS Program was compared to Kuchler’s Potential Natural Vegetation map and the 1993 Kansas Land Cover Patterns map. The post-classification change detection technique was used along with co-occurrence matrices to identify areas and directions of land cover change. Comparisons showed that the land cover of Kansas has drastically changed since European settlement. Over 48% of the land is now cultivated and native vegetation types such as tallgrass and shortgrass prairie have been dramatically reduced in area. There are, however, millions of ha of these vegetation types remaining in Kansas. Comparisons between the more recent land cover maps reveal that over 80% of the land in Kansas has remained unchanged in the past 8-10 years. Recent land cover changes include grassland to cropland, cropland to grassland, and grassland to woodland. Areas changing from cropland to grassland have been identified as land being enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). Post-classification change detection analysis also shows that forest and woodland types have increased over the last 8-10 years and over 1 million ha of grassland have been converted to cropland. The extents of these increases are questionable, however, due to misregistration errors and classification methodologies used to generate the land cover maps.