Emerging and Contemporary Technologies in Remote Sensing for Ecosystem Assessment and Change Detection on Military Reservations

Extensive land areas and environmental questions on military landscapes suggest the need for procedures for identifying and monitoring the fundamental vegetation and soil attributes quickly and efficiently. This study is an effort to: (1) evaluate emerging and contemporary remote sensing technology for examining plant succession; (2) determine ecosystem response and recovery in relation to disturbance and degradation through retrospective studies with spatially-explicit spectral-based indices; (3) identify spatial, spectral and temporal attributes of remote sensing systems necessary to identify ecotones and improve vegetation mapping; and, (4) develop methods for upscaling indices between coarse and fine resolution imagery. An important goal is to incorporate data into land based carrying capacity models as well as detecting and monitoring change. We are currently developing algorithms for improved and more efficient image processing of large (50 - 100 image) contemporary satellite datasets. These algorithms will also be incorporated in the decision support system developed for the Army National Guard called the National Environmental Database (NED) at Utah State University. Data from space platforms shows promise for mapping landscapes and identifying ecotones. Near-earth, large-scale multispectral airborne videography with submeter pixels is being evaluated to identify and quantify species or species guild composition across ecotones and along degradation gradients.