Lab Group: Steffen Seamon, Simon Cohen
Date of Inquiry: September 6, 2018
Land Use/Cover Change Lab
Background
In the anthropocene, land is being constantly modified by humans to serve a number of different purposes. People have changed their local environments to suit their needs, often without thought as to how that affects the ecosystem. Land use can have some unintended impacts, such as: changing vegetation, creating pollution, and biodiversity loss (Verburg et al., 2015). When looking at a satellite picture of Collins View from 1939, we can observe that the neighborhood consisted mostly of small patches of trees, cleared land, and some settlements in the northern part of the area. Today, almost all of the neighborhood is covered by houses and their backyards split up by roads. We have set out to see what effects the change of this land and intensification of its use has created.
The purpose of this lab is to qualitatively and quantitatively observe how a specific site in the Collins View neighborhood has changed over time due to land use/cover change. We can qualitatively observe how the land has changed over time using satellite imagery. Satellite imagery is helpful because it gives a large and unique view of an area. However, it is limited in that it only aerially shows how land is covered. We are also taking data within our site to observe the effects of land use and cover change more closely. We will observe our physical site to observe how the land is being used and maintained today. Knowing that the land is probably being most intensely used today, we can see what implications a somewhat dense suburban neighborhood can have on a previously forested area.
Procedure and Analysis
First we chose to center our site around a house in Collins View. We chose this house because the owners gave us permission to use their property and its placement allows us to observe a good amount of both private and public land. When we got to the site, we established our centroid, took note of its latitude and longitude using a GPS, and attached the Kestrel drop to a tree. We did our best to establish the four corners of our 90×90 meter site; however, we could only place flags at the northwest and northeast corners because the other two corners fell on private land that we were not granted access to use. We took pictures facing outwards in all directions from the centroid and inwards from the viable corners.
The site that we established has a diversity of different types of land use. The site contains roads, structures like houses and fences, groomed vegetation, and non-maintained vegetation. There is also a mix of public and private land. The house where we placed our centroid has a neatly maintained backyard where the homeowners have taken measures to actively deter the presence of wild animals such as moles.
Results
Centroid: 45.45517ºN, -122.67667ºW
Discussion
In our investigation we observed the content of a 90×90 site located in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. We can use information we gathered from our sight to draw inferences on similar areas. However, we should be careful to not make too forward predictions since we only have a sample size of one. For example, a neighborhood in a different area of Portland, Oregon may have a similar ratio of private to public land, so it could be useful to understanding how land usage affects biotic and abiotic factors in similar areas to ours. In observing the details of land use within the property of one homeowner, we can produce implications in how a homeowner of similar income level, land ownership, and geographical location might use his or her land. Additionally, by observing the content in this site, we can draw implications on how public land might be developed and shared in a residential area.
Other groups observed 90 x 90 sites in different locations with different land use outcomes. Some of these groups observed sites in a residential area like our own, but other groups collected information of sites in River View Natural Area and the campus of Lewis and Clark College. All of these areas were once temperate rainforests. Now two of them are developed, but to different degrees. We can draw comparisons between the three areas to observe how different land uses create different effects.
Simon's Site 