             
 The LUHNA Book!
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Linda Brooks, Bureau of Land Management, Springfield VA Mike Crane, U.S. Geological Survey, Denver CO Dominic Della Salla, World Wildlife Fund, Washington DC John Dennis, National Park Service, Washington DC Sam Droege, National Biological Service, Patuxent MD David Foster, Harvard Forest, Petersham MA Dana Hinzman, University of Maryland, Baltimore MD Tony Janetos, NASA, Washington DC Tom Lovejoy, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC Gary Machlis, National Park Service/University of Idaho, Moscow ID Paul Martin, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ Jim Nichols, National Biological Service, Patuxent MD Brand Neimann, National Biological Service, Washington DC Barry Noon, USDA Forest Service, Arcata CA Mike Palmer, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater OK Steward Pickett, Institute of Environmental Studies, Millbrook NY Ron Pulliam, National Biological Service, Washington DC Mike Scott, National Biological Service/University of Idaho, Moscow, ID Tom Sisk, National Biological Service/Stanford University, Washington DC Tom Spies, USDA Forest Service, Corvallis OR Monica Turner, University of Wisconsin, Madison WI Donald Wortser, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS Bruce Wright, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston VA
Day 1: Monday, August 14 1995
8:30 - 9:00 Greeting and Introductions.
9:00 - 9:30 Overview of LUHNA Concept.
9:30 - 9:45 Meeting Objectives and Schedule.
9:45 - 12:00 Working Session: State of the Art;
Data Availability; Current Research
Four 30 min. blocks. Topic introduction and overview,
followed by open discussion.
Topics:
1. Landscapes prior to European settlement.
2. Patterns of human land use: historical and
anthropological perspectives.
3. Early land surveys, aerial photography, and other
sources of ecological history: 1700-1900
4. Twentieth century landscapes: early and current
land characterization capabilities.
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch.
1:00 - 3:00 Working Session:
How Can We Build a Realistic LUHNA?
Four 30 min. blocks. Topic introduction and overview,
followed by open discussion.
Topics:
1. Organizing around a common theme: quantitative
approaches to landscape ecology.
2. Integrating data: management and analytical needs,
distributed data sets, spatial statistical
approaches.
3. Technical capabilities: data exploration and
presentation. What might a "completed"
turn-of-the-century LUHNA look, feel, and sound
like?
4. Building and sustaining a long-term research effort:
project definition, institutional support,
collaborative projects that are investigator-driven.
3:00 - 3:30 Half hour break.
3:30 - 4:30 Discussion: setting objectives: short-term and
long-term. Identifying the future users and the
broader audience for LUHNA. A realistic look at
funding possibilities.
4:30 - 5:30 Closing discussion: a concept paper for LUHNA.
6:30 - 9:00 Group Dinner.
Day 2: Tuesday, August 15 1995
8:30 - 12:00 Concept paper for LUHNA: integrating across
temporal and spatial scales.
Distribute and discuss draft outline.
Defining audience and purpose.
Revise/rewrite draft outline.
Writing assignments.
Time line.
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch.
1:00 - 4:00 Selecting criteria for pilot projects.
Geographic focus.
Temporal focus.
Integration across time, space, disciplines.
Incorporating products from pilot projects
into LUHNA concept paper.
4:00 Adjourn.
August 13-14 1995I. Overview A group of 25 scholars, representing six government agencies, seven universities, and three independent scientific organizations convened for two days to discuss the value and feasibility of compiling a history of land cover change and human land use throughout North America. The participants brought experience and expertise in geography, ecology, environmental history, sociology, statistics, and cartography. The first day was spent examining existing sources of information and the insights emerging from recent research. The second day's work focused on planning the preliminary phase of the project. Initial efforts will be designed to illustrate the value and feasibility of the project through a number of pilot projects and the publication of a "concept paper." This document will propose an expanded, comprehensive LUHNA effort, to be completed by the turn of the century. The following notes summarize much of the conversation and recommendations that emerged from the workshop. II. Introduction In late 1994, the National Biological Service (NBS) began discussion of a program to develop an historical atlas of North American landscapes. Initial discussions were enthusiastically received by representatives of other Federal and state agencies and by representatives of several professional societies. This workshop was the initial effort to reach out to a group of leading researchers working in the related fields. Based on the results of the workshop and interest expressed by others, NBS is moving forward with a demonstration project that will illustrate the concept and propose an expanded, collaborative effort that will produce a comprehensive land use history. The project, titled Land Use History of North America (LUHNA), will focus on historical vegetation and land cover patterns, as well as the anthropogenic factors driving those changes. Spatially referenced data, presented in map form, will integrate historical information drawn from diverse sources, including paleoecological records, historical narratives, early land surveys, aerial photography, and satellite imagery. NBS Director Ron Pulliam initiated discussion by stating that LUHNA must address both land cover and land use. Land cover focuses on patterns of vegetation, surface water, exposed rock and ice, urbanization, and other landscape features. Land use focuses on humans as one of the important driving forces in the determination of land cover patterns. Understanding the linkage between human actions and land cover change is important to societies as they adjust to changing environments. Socio-cultural traditions can affect patterns of land cover, making land use history a much more complex subject than the determination of land cover change. However, based on biophysical constraints, there are only limited number of ways people can use the land and examination of the past land uses and their impacts on biological systems should provide valuable insight into the role of humans in dynamic biological systems. A crucial challenge is to demonstrate the relevance of LUHNA in land management decisions. One way to illustrate this potential is through a series of pilot projects. These pilot projects should convey the extent, nature, and rate of temporal changes on a local and regional scale, and they should examine both "background" levels of change and the impacts of human activities. To demonstrate land changes over time, LUHNA must create a data library from a variety of sources. LUHNA should establish standards that will facilitate the integration of disparate data sets and assure maximum utility from all data collected or compiled. Specific topics include data format, vegetation classification scheme, appropriate spatial and temporal scales, and the resolution, precision, and accuracy standards for spatial data. Scale and resolution will differ, even at initial stages, depending on data source and quality of the data. LUHNA must develop a hierarchical data structure that will permit the nesting of information at differing scales and resolutions, e.g. a detailed look at a specific region within the southern Appalachians may be nested within a very coarse map of forest cover for the southeastern USA. A fundamental objective of the LUHNA project should be to provide an improved ability to extrapolate from the historical changes in land cover and generate predictions about the future. III. The Historical Record: Sources of Data, Availability, Biases The temporal intervals addressed by LUHNA should include a series of time slices reaching back, at a minimum, to the period preceding European settlement of North America. A diversity of data sources and analytical approaches are currently available, but most data have been under-utilized, and techniques are rapidly evolving. Workshop participants presented brief overviews and discussion of historical records for several time periods and avenues of investigation. A. Landscapes prior to the European settlement. The paleoecological record offers an increasingly rich and varied perspective on early land cover and landscape change. Paul Martin discussed patterns of faunal extinctions and evidence of vegetation dynamics in arid North America. He highlighted the links between floral and faunal assemblages and spoke about deriving information on Native American land use and land cover changes due to climatic shifts. There was discussion of the enormity of the task of reconstructing comprehensive, large-scale picture from the paleoecological record. David Foster agreed that paleoecological studies provide essential information needed for LUHNA, and offered examples from several regions, focusing on New England forests. He noted that the paleoecological record has biases associated with it. For example, pollen cores, the fossil record, fire history, and archeological sites all preserve information in a biased form -- some pollen or fossils preserve better than others, some sites are more conducive to preservation, etc. The strength of these data lies in the fact that the magnitude of the biases are relatively constant over substantial periods, allowing fairly robust trends detection. Changing patterns in Northeastern forest cover were discussed. B. Historical, anthropological and sociological perspectives Discussion, led by Donald Worster and Gary Machlis clarified the distinctions between "land cover" and "land use," terms that often have been used interchangeably by ecologists. Several people felt that agreement on the scope of LUHNA should be reached before project planning moved forward. Land use implies an understanding or attention to the cultural factors influencing human actions and, thus, land cover change. A true land use history should examine the social and cultural history that generated change in landscapes. Discussions touched on the differences in patterns of European settlement under the English and Spanish rule, on the effects of interregional migration driven by westward expansion, and on the influence of water on land use patterns in the West. The complexities of these cultural "driving forces" were discussed, and the ability of LUHNA to address this level of land use was debated. Most favored explicit treatment of land use, but acknowledged that it would be difficult to express this perspective in the map-based, quantitative framework developed to document land cover change. A mixed, multi-disciplinary approach should integrate narrative history and historical maps articulating land use history with the highly visual, quantitative documentation of land cover change. To the extent possible, these perspectives should be linked through the use of standardized systems for classification of vegetation and other land cover types. C. Early Land Surveys, Aerial Photography and other Data Sources Linda Brooks described records, housed by the Bureau of Land Management, from early land surveys of the United States. The records from the General Land Office (GLO) have been used in a number of projects to reconstruct land cover at the time of European settlement. The willingness of BLM to work with LUHNA investigators was expressed, and it was agreed that some system of cataloging the dates and the extent of information available for different parts of the country would be helpful. Aerial photographs are another valuable source of information on land use and land cover. Beginning in the 1920's, comprehensive coverage is available for much of the country. Problems with archival and retrieval of material present significant barriers to the use of this information. The Department of Agriculture's Natural Resource Conservation Service houses extensive photo collections. The usefulness of the land cover record preserved in aerial photographs was demonstrated by Mike Crane. He presented work examining complex patterns of urbanization and changing land use along Colorado's Front Range. Mosaics of photos from different time periods provided a high resolution, historical perspective on a rapidly changing region. Statistical approaches for sampling from very large data archives were suggested. It should be possible to design sampling protocols that would select a subset of the available images within a geographic area and employ spatial statistical approaches to generate a probabilistic map of land cover at a given time. This approach would sacrifice accuracy at particular locations for efficiency in generating geographically extensive coverages. Accuracy could be assessed by sampling from the unused images and comparing with the statistically derived maps. Mike Palmer described efforts to compile and analyze distributional information from floras. This historical botanical information can be used to assess the completeness of botanical inventories, and predict plant diversity in unsampled areas. Other information available from biological inventories and surveys could be compiled to document the expansion and contraction of the ranges of plants and animals. In many cases, these patterns can be linked to patterns in human land use. The spread of non-indigenous species is an issue of broad interest that could be effectively addressed through LUHNA. D. Contemporary Landscapes Efforts to derive information on contemporary land cover and land use reach far beyond the needs of LUHNA. Landsat coverage is comprehensive and widely available. Among the many projects looking at contemporary land cover, the NBS's Gap Analysis Program offers an excellent opportunity for establishing a baseline for LUHNA spatial data. Scale and resolution of the initial LUHNA products might be comparable to the early GAP products (i.e. scale 1:100,000, resolution ~30m.) Mike Scott discussed collaboration between GAP and the USGS mapping division. Opportunities for data sharing abound. Tony Janetos discussed approaches for using Landsat and other remotely sensed data to document land cover change, quantify fragmentation, and trace the diversity of patterns in vegetation types. Many techniques developed to examine contemporary imagery could be applied to historic landscapes, once digital maps were generated from historic data sources. IV. Quantitative Approaches for Building LUHNA Bringing together information from many different sources and integrating it into a cohesive and useful product will require a common framework for organization. Many participants expressed the need for a quantitative database that will support a diversity of analytical approaches. Monica Turner summarized current methods and approaches employed in landscape ecology. Common uses of LUHNA will involve determination of the rate of change over time and comparison between different sites. In addition, linking land cover change to land use will require quantitative measures of each. The development of a predictive capability, drawing on historic patterns and trends in land cover, will require a consistent analytical framework. Much of the necessary analytical capability exists or is under development, however, data acquisition is often the limiting step. A critical first step in LUHNA is the adoption of data standards, classification categories, and appropriate scales of analyses. This should precede large scale efforts to compile new databases. Discussion did not resolve these issues; additional work is needed. Pilot projects will serve to refine an initial set of data standards prior to an expanded effort There was general agreement that, in addition to the visual, map-based products of LUHNA, underlying data should be provided in a standard, electronic format, providing access to baseline information and the opportunity for additional analysis. V. Building LUHNA: Preliminary Steps LUHNA should reach a broad and diverse audience, ranging from policy makers to scientists and resource managers, to educators and their students, and to the general public. Reaching a broad audience will require a stimulating format for conveying historical information in a graphical context. GIS imagery and CD-Rom capabilities should be coupled to produce an interactive data base. Complementary paper and electronic versions of a LUHNA atlas will ensure that the information reaches a maximum number of potential users. The resource management community constitutes a large and influential audience for LUHNA. Decisions affecting the way that resources are managed in the future can and should be informed by an historical perspective. LUHNA should provide managers with the capability to query specific resource attributes to see how they have changed through time. A. Pilot Project NBS (which became the Biological Resource Division (BRD) of USGS on October 1, 1996) and NASA intend to sponsor a handful of pilot projects that, collectively, will illustrate the types of data available, novel analytical techniques, and the diversity of questions that can be addressed by such analyses. Products will be developed in a format that is understandable to a wide audience, and they will focus on issues of broad interest to the American public. It is expected that much of this material will be in the form of map-based data products and graphical illustration of patterns and trends. The technical tools and analyses used to generate the results will be referenced to scientifically credible methodologies. Graphic and data products will be accompanied by a concise textual treatment of the work, covering the purpose, data sources, methods, results, and interpretation. Projects selected for funding should be complementary and should demonstrate the scope of questions that can be addressed by an expanded LUHNA program. The goal is to present a diversity of temporal and spatial scales and the different insights that are provided by a variety of approaches. Candidate projects may range from low resolution, extensive time slice analyses, based in part on paleoecological data, to more contemporary analyses derived from recent remote sensing technology. These products will be incorporated into a synthesis document that will serve as a demonstration of the LUHNA concept and a vehicle for promoting a larger, more comprehensive research initiative that will strive for a continent-wide perspective (see below.) Delivered products need not be in final presentation form, but all data analysis and map composition should be complete. BRD's GIS and publication capabilities will be used to standardize presentation and integrate products, subject to the approval of the principal investigators. Example Pilot Projects Themes
Proposed Location Criteria Projects will cover a wide range of geographic locations, ecosystem types, and disturbance regimes, from landscapes driven by natural processes to those transformed by human activities. Some possible criteria include:
B. Concept Paper The primary purpose of the publication is to illustrate the LUHNA concept and propose the production of a comprehensive history of land use and land cover change for North America. The publication will demonstrate the educational and public policy value of a Land Use History and convey the utility of such a history in guiding future resource management decisions. In addition to providing a conceptual foundation for such an expanded effort, the paper will identify essential components of LUHNA, such as the ability to make robust comparisons between locations and over time. Further, it will identify the major areas of new research needed to integrate approaches taken by different disciplines, such as anthropology, environmental history, ecology, and remote sensing. The targeted audience will be potential sources of funding for an expanded LUHNA effort. In addition, the publication will strive to convey the value of LUHNA to policy makers, educators, and lay readers in ecology/environment, anthropology, history, geography, public policy. The format will be suggestive of an atlas, with narrative historical sections complementing extensive maps and graphics. Two different venues, with differing formats, will be produced simultaneously. A print version will include 30- 50 oversize pages, heavily illustrated in color. Maps will play a central role in conveying concept and information. An electronic version will present the same information via a peer-reviewed homepage on World Wide Web, with hypertext graphics including maps, simulations, videos, etc. Release of both versions will be targeted for 4 July 1996. VI. LUHNA: the Long View Ron Pulliam suggested that NBS is an appropriate base for the preliminary phase of LUHNA, but that over the next 6-12 months there should be continuing discussion about the eventual, long-term home of LUHNA. It is clear that the project will require cooperation between many partners from government agencies, academia, museums, and non-profit organizations. NBS (currently BRD) will take an active, leading role in efforts to invigorate and energize the LUHNA effort and to build support and partnerships with other interest parties. LUHNA has been initiated as a loose network of collaborating investigators that share a common vision of the need for a better understanding of the history of North American landscapes. A LUHNA working group, formed from workshop participants and others, will guide development of LUHNA and will help determine LUHNA's finial domicile. The project will benefit from new partnerships with a variety of research and educational institutions. In addition to the research interests expressed by the workshop participants, LUHNA might produce classroom materials demonstrating relationships between geography and history, and it might lead to a multi-media exhibit on changing American landscapes at the Smithsonian.
The conference concluded with a discussion of strategies for building and sustaining a
long-term, collaborative effort. The workshop participants endorsed a strategy for the
Preliminary Stage of LUHNA that involves the support of pilot projects and the
publication of a concept paper that will demonstrate the value of an expanded LUHNA
effort. All pledged to reach out to their colleagues and to participate in the continuing
dialogue as the project evolves.
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