EMERGING LANDSCAPES, EVOLVING PRIORITIES:
ASSESSING THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN LAND COVER CHANGE
AND THE MANAGEMENT OF INTRODUCED SPECIES AND HABITATS
ON THE TURNER RANCHES IN SOUTHERN NEW MEXICO
A proposal to the College of Arts & Sciences
University of New Mexico
14 May 2012
PI: K. Maria D. Lane, Ph.D.
Department of Geography & Environmental Studies
University of New Mexico
Co-PI: Christopher D. Lippitt, Ph.D.
Department of Geography
San Diego State University
Budget Overview
Personnel
$8,290.88
Travel
$1,871.96
Total*
$10,000.00
*Note: Amount in excess of maximum
award will be requested as a supplement
from departmental funds or will be provided
through the PI’s professional travel account.
Budget Explanation
With this proposal, we are seeking a maximum award of $10,000. This award will be used to
fund a graduate research assistant and to support research travel from UNM to the Ladder and
Armendaris Ranches. Projected expenses total $10,162.84. The small amount exceeding the
maximum award will be requested as a supplement from PI’s departmental funds or will be
provided through the PI’s professional travel account.
Personnel: Graduate Research Assistant ($8,290.88)
A graduate research assistant will be hired to work under the direct supervision of Dr.
Christopher Lippitt to conduct the following parts of the research: identification and processing
of data sources, remote sensing analysis, creation of a land cover map. The appointment will be
made for 10 hours/week in both fall 2012 and spring 2013, with a monthly stipend of $737.50.
(This is one-half of the standard rate paid for 20-hour/week TA and RA appointments in the
Department of Geography). This appointment will include the standard fringe rates and health
insurance, as shown.
Research Assistant, 8/2012-5/2013
Stipend = $737.50/month for 9 months
Fringe on RA Salary (1%)
Health insurance
$675 for Fall 2012 and $912 for Spring/Summer 2013
TOTAL
$6,637.50
$66.38
$1,587
$8,290.88
Travel: In-State Travel ($1,871.96)
Project staff will travel to the ranches to meet with and interview ranch managers and biologists,
both before after the creation of a land cover map. Each visit will require a two-day trip, with one
day spent at the Ladder Ranch and one day spent at the Armendaris Ranch. Two nights of
lodging will be required in Truth or Consequences, NM. Rates for lodging, M&IE, and mileage
comply with the UNM Business Policies and Procedures Manual and federal GSA rates.
August 2012 – 2 days, 2 nights, 3 personnel
Purpose: visual assessment of land cover, interviews with ranch managers and biologists
Attendees: Maria Lane, Chris Lippitt, Student RA
Lodging: 3 rooms, 2 nights each @ $77 = $462
M&IE: 2 days x 3 participants @ $46/person/day = $276
Mileage: 298 miles roundtrip x $0.51/mile = $151.98
May 2013 – 2 days, 2 nights, 4 personnel
Purpose: present and review land cover map with ranch managers, evaluate potential
future projects, interview ranch managers and biologists about land cover mapping results
Attendees: Maria Lane, Chris Lippitt, Caitlin Lippitt, Chris Duvall
Lodging: 3 rooms, 2 nights each @ $77 = $462
M&IE: 2 days x 4 participants @ $46/person/day = $368
Mileage: 298 miles roundtrip x $0.51/mile = $151.98
TOTAL
$1,871.96
1
Research Plan
Abstract
The goal of the proposed research is to link spatially explicit data on land cover patterns to a
historical and perceptual timeline of land management practices on the Ladder and Armendaris
Ranches in southern New Mexico. Data gathered through spatial-scientific and social-scientific
methods will be quantitatively integrated to identify key historical-ecological relationships
between species introductions, habitat management decisions, and past land cover change within
the two ranches’ boundaries.
By assembling these baseline data for the Turner Ranches, this preliminary project will
lay the foundation for a larger, longer-term research program that examines the Turner Ranches
within a spatially-linked corridor of protected public lands stretching along New Mexico’s
southern Rio Grande Valley. Future investigations will focus on key relationships identified in
this initial study, integrating more extensive qualitative data with finer-grained spatial analysis in
order to (1) determine whether and to what extent the unique private ownership status of the
large Turner landholdings has impacted its conservation potential compared to nearby publiclyheld protected tracts, and (2) predict potential vegetative and land cover changes throughout the
corridor under various scenarios for environmental (climate) and economic change.
A major thrust of the proposed project is to develop robust methods for analyzing
coupled human-environment systems that can then be productively applied to both publicly- and
privately-held conservation lands, taking into account political, legal, and economic structures
that constrain and/or enable various forms of land management and environmental change.
Understanding Landscape Change in Coupled Human-Environment Systems
Research agendas in the fields of Geography and Sustainability Science have been dominated
recently by attempts to understand landscape change at a variety of spatial scales. Work in landchange science (LCS) has typically focused on the structural and functional aspects of
environmental change, using GIS and Remote Sensing technology to quantify and assess the
consequences of changing land uses and land covers, often at broad international or global scales
(Turner et al. 2008). Work in political ecology (PE), on the other hand, has been more attuned to
the political-economic and social causes of ecological change, focusing more typically on
qualitative investigation of individual land managers or organizational structures within subnational or local contexts. (e.g. Zimmerer and Bassett 2003, Liverman 2004).
Although these two research strands have often struggled to find common theoretical
and methodological ground, recent calls for their integration (especially Turner and Robbins
2008) have gained traction by emphasizing the importance of understanding both causes and
consequences of ecosystem vulnerability to biophysical (e.g. climate) change as well as to
political-economic and social change. This most recent work has begun to integrate diverse
methodologies to understand coupled human-environment systems in more complex ways. Finegrained investigations of explanatory factors in the political and social realms, for example, have
been successfully quantified to allow their incorporation into regression analytics that are
commonly used in LCS (e.g. Aldrich et al. 2012, Brenner 2011). The proposed project aims to
contribute to this integrated and interdisciplinary scholarship by developing new methods for
understanding key relationships between protected areas’ management practices and
environmental change within their boundaries.
The spatial data collected in this study will be generated through remote sensing,
which provides a uniquely synoptic sample and historical record of land cover and habitat status
2
(Townshend et al. 1991). This unique historical record has permitted the analysis of changes in
land cover and use over time (e.g., Pontius et al. 2008, Stow et al. in press, Coulter et al. 2011)
and provided calibration for inference into likely land cover conditions in the future (Franklin
1995). United States Geological Survey (USGS) and National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) operated sensor programs such as Landsat and MODIS are explicitly
designed and operated to provide a continuous and comparable record of land cover and use over
time. Since the inception of the Landsat program in 1972, the sensor has provided a record of
land surface status at approximately 60 meter, and later 30 and 15 meter, ground sampling
distances and has thus permitted quantitative estimates of land cover type at those spatial
resolutions (Blaschke et al. 2001).
Linear spectral unmixing (SMA), a technique borrowed from chemistry, has been
shown to reliably permit the estimation of fractional land cover estimates within a pixel (i.e.,
sample) and thus permit the estimation of land cover as a proportion of each pixel (Small et al.
2001). SMA allows remote sensing to break from the ontology of land cover as discrete units
(i.e., pixels) with a single membership category and to instead adopt the more biologically and
ecologically appropriate ontology of land cover as a continuously varying property at the course
spatial scales observed by LandSat (Strahler et al. 1986). Fractional land cover estimates
produced through SMA have been show to provide reliable estimates of sub-pixel land cover
proportion and improved estimates of land cover change when compared to pixel based
approaches (e.g., Roberts et al. 1998, Rogan et al. 2002, Powell et al. 2007).
The accurate characterization of land cover and/or use has been shown to be critical to
the reliable inference of land cover and/or use over space and time (Pontius 2000, Pontius and
Lippitt 2006, Pontius et al. 2008). The research described in this proposal is therefore intended
not only to provide a record of land cover status to assess the impact of various management
practices through time, but also to permit the modeling of land cover under various climatic
conditions and management practices in the future. This record of land cover status will be
reviewed with ranch managers and biologists at the Turner Ranches, as a means of generating
and testing new methods that jointly analyze management practice and paradigms alongside the
realities of environmental change.
Turner Ranches in Southern New Mexico: A Unique Study Area
The Turner Ranches of southern New Mexico are unique in several ways, most notably as very
large private landholdings that are managed for multiple uses typically associated with similarlysized public protected lands. The Ladder and Armendaris ranches are both managed for profit,
with bison production and ecotourism/hunting reportedly generating primary receipts, but the
ranches also host the Turner Endangered Species Fund with its variety of conservation-oriented
species reintroduction efforts (Miller et al. 2007, List et al. 2007, Truett 2010). This unique
combination of private ownership, for-profit status, and conservation-oriented species
management within a single property boundary raises considerable political-ecological interest
in terms of the structural, political, and economic constraints on habitat management within the
ranches.
In addition, the ranches’ spatial location within a quasi-corridor of protected lands
managed by public agencies raises the possibility for examining differential land cover impacts
on the basis of structural influences or managerial decisions. From Bosque del Apache National
Wildlife Refuge to Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge and the Jornada Experimental Range, the
Turner Ranches are surrounded by public lands that operate under different management
paradigms, economic constraints, and governance structures. This project intends to develop
3
methods for understanding the relationships between management practice and environmental
change on the most politically complicated of these landholdings, with broader intentions of
using these methods to eventually understand past and present change throughout the corridor.
The Ladder and Armedaris Ranches (and, indeed, the entire corridor of interest) are
primarily dominated by desert ecosystems, occupying the north-western perimeter of the
Chihuahuan desert. Like much of the Chihuahuan desert, the land cover is dominated by desert
grassland and shrubland, with smaller portions of pinyon juniper woodland. Higher elevation
areas of both ranches contain ponderosa pine and mixed coniferous forest. The predicted
transition of much of the southwestern United States to warmer drier climate (Seager et al. 2007)
mean that many of these higher elevation areas, which are typically characterized by a cool
mesic climate, will likely transition to become more like their lower elevation counterparts. The
ongoing climatic changes in the desert southwest (Mote et al. 2005) suggest that these
predictions are coming to fruition and will likely require adaptations in management strategy
with respect to both commercial, introduced, and protected species at the ranches in the
southwest at large.
Workplan and Timeline
The primary work to be completed with the proposed budget involves creation of a land cover
map and compilation of qualitative interview data from ranch managers and biological personnel
working within the Ladder and Armendaris Ranches.
Phase 1: August 2012
The research team will visit both ranches to visually assess land cover conditions, gather
information from Turner Endangered Species Fund personnel about species introduction
operations, and interview ranch managers about their historical and current land management
approaches. This qualitative data collection will focus on generating narrative accounts of
biologists’ and ranch managers’ activities, constraints, and perceptions of the ways their
activities impact vegetative patterns and land cover changes. Qualitative data will be gathered via
open-ended interviews with individual personnel.
Phase 2: August 2012 – May 2013
Landcover mapping will be conducted primarily by a supervised graduate research assistant, who
will gather data and create a land cover map of both ranches using freely available remotely
sense data. Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) image
data will be acquired from the Environmental Resources and Observation Center (EROS) for
time periods prior to and following the introduction of managed species. To better understand the
impact the of introduced species and new land management practices, the proportion of green
vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation, bare soil, and shadow will be estimated from the time
series of moderate resolution remote sensing samples. Specifically, Linear spectral unmixing
(Small 2001, Rogan et al. 2002) will be used to estimate the relative fraction of the above
described endmembers and subsequently provide a synoptic record of bio-physically
interpretable estimates of land cover and habitat status over time.
The estimation of subpixel land cover status will require: 1) the identification and
evaluation of appropriate image data from the EROS data center, 2) geometric and radiometric
normalization of image data to permit comparable estimates of land cover fractions over time
(Aplin 2006), 3) the collection and verification of ground reference data to support model
calibration and validation, and 4) estimation of fractional land cover by linear spectral unmixing.
4
Phase 3: May 2013
To finalize the proposed project, the research team will visit both ranches to present the new land
cover map and to interview ranch managers and biological personnel about how the remotely
sensed map product influences their initial perceptions of land cover change. In addition, this
followup visit will be used to evaluate the potential for future projects that would involve a larger
interdisciplinary team of UNM faculty and students in the analysis of land management decisionmaking and environmental change on protected lands in southern New Mexico.
Results and Significance
The first objective of this project is to produce a detailed land cover map for both the Ladder and
Armendaris Ranches. The resultant time series of fractional land cover estimates will permit:
correlation of land cover changes to specific changes in management practice or species
introductions, targeting of geographic areas for finer scale analysis, modeling of species
distribution within the ranches, and estimation of climate change impacts under various
management regimes. Produced maps will also be provided to ranch managers and are expected
to aid in the interactive identification future research priorities and to provide an invaluable data
set for both field and laboratory experiments with students. Finally, the inference of future land
cover based on continuous fractional estimates of land cover is a novel methodological approach
that products of the proposed research are intended to support.
Second, this project will produce a detailed study of the ways managers and biological
personnel on the Turner Ranches perceive the historical and current land-cover impacts of their
species introduction and management initiatives. By generating a perceptual managementpractice timeline that can be correlated to the spatial data of the land cover map, the study will
identify key relationships between management practices and ecological changes.
The end goal of these two research products is to develop a robust methodology that
can be used to examine causes and consequences of ecological change throughout the Turner
Ranches and surrounding protected lands. By analyzing land cover change and its relationship to
management approaches on the Turner Ranches, we hope to lay the foundation for future
scholarship that can analyze potential effects of biophysical/economic change on ecologicallysimilar sites, taking into account different management histories and conservation priorities.
Project Responsibilities
Remote Sensing, Land Cover Mapping, and Vegetative Change Analysis
Dr. C.D. Lippitt will be primarily responsible for the land cover mapping effort. He will select
and train a qualified Research Assistant and will then supervise the collection of remote sensing
data, image processing and the collection of field of reference data. Dr. Duvall will serve as a
subject area adviser for the biogeographical patterns associated with animal habitats in arid
landscapes. C.L. Lippitt will serve as a subject area adviser for remote sensing in arid
landscapes at various spatial scales.
Analysis of Historical and Modern Landscape Management Practices
Dr. Lane will be primarily responsible for collecting historical and qualitative data related to the
management perspectives and strategies use to guide species introductions at the Turner
Ranches. She will guide the overall research objectives linking the land cover mapping to the
management decisions, working in concert with Dr. C.D. Lippitt to develop and test various
methodological options that link the qualitative and spatial data sets.
5
Long-term Potential
This proposal seeks to establish baseline data on landscape scale processes and
management regimes at Ladder and Armendaris ranches to lay the foundation for a larger,
longer-term research program that examines the Turner Ranches within a spatially-linked
corridor of protected public lands stretching along New Mexico’s southern Rio Grande Valley.
Future investigations will focus on key relationships identified in this initial study, integrating
more extensive qualitative data with finer-grained spatial analysis in order to (1) determine
whether and to what extent the unique private ownership status of the large Turner landholdings
has impacted its conservation potential compared to nearby publicly-held protected tracts, and
(2) predict potential vegetative and land cover changes throughout the corridor under various
scenarios for environmental (climate) and economic change. A major thrust of the proposed
project is to develop robust methods for analyzing coupled human-environment systems that can
then be productively applied to both publicly- and privately-held conservation lands, taking into
account political, legal, and economic structures that constrain and/or enable various forms of
land management and environmental change.
In follow-on research, we seek to establish an interdisciplinary long term research
program analyzing the coupled human-environment system of the Southern Rio Grande Valley.
Through a combination of qualitative documentation of management regimes and quantitative
analysis of the interaction between landscape change processes and changes in management
practice, a long term education and research program focusing on human-environment
interaction under various management practices will be established.
Specifically, we will seek funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to
establish an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) Site based at the Turner
Ranches. The REU site proposal will provide for the involvement of faculty and undergraduate
students in interdisciplinary mixed methods research focused on human-environment relations.
We would work to include faculty and students from across campus in the REU site proposal
(including from Earth & Planetary Sciences, Biology, History, and potentially Community and
Regional Planning), emphasizing to NSF that the proposed REU site would contribute
significantly to the training of underrepresented groups in both STEM disciplines and social
sciences.
Additional opportunities for research support include NSF Social, Economic, and
Behavioral Science and GeoSciences programs, the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), and the State of New Mexico. The proposed research program
leverages NASA earth observation assets to understand the the effect of political, legal, and
economic structures that constrain and/or enable various forms of land management and
environmental change in the Southern Rio Grande Valley; research which has direct implications
for land management in the state of New Mexico, demonstrates the utility of NASA assets for
understanding complex coupled human-environment systems, and represents an ideal
environment for educating future scientists in the type of integrated interdisciplinary approaches
required to understand the complexities of interaction between humans and their environment.
Finally, the Turner Endangered Species Fund, a non-profit foundation that manages
species introductions at Turner Ranches and seeks to exploit the unique environment and status
of the ranches to further scientific understanding, will benefit directly from the proposed research
and represents a potential future funding source and collaborator.
6
Biographical Information
K. Maria D. Lane, PI
Dr. Lane has expertise in the historical geography of resource management in arid landscapes,
with a particular focus on twentieth-century water management in the American Southwest. She
has obtained grants from numerous agencies, most recently as the PI on a multi-year project
funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), with support from its programs in both
Science, Technology and Society as well as Geography and Spatial Sciences. Her NSFsupported work uses qualitative and archival methods to investigate water management in New
Mexico, focusing on the legal-historical geographies of conflict, negotiation, and scientific
knowledge production. This work has been published in Journal of Historical Geography and is
forthcoming in Aether. Dr. Lane is also the author of several publications on the historical
development of scientific thinking about arid-lands geography on the planet Mars, most notably
the monograph Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet (University of
Chicago Press, 2011).
Dr. Lane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental
Studies at UNM. She received her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Texas-Austin in
2006, and a M.S.C.R.P. (Environmental Planning focus) at the University of Texas in 2000.
Christopher D. Lippitt, Co-PI
Dr. C.D. Lippitt has expertise in remote sensing, species distribution modeling, and spatial
analysis, with a focus on the exploitation of remote sensing data for time-sensitive analysis, timeseries analysis, and the optimization of information delivery systems, particularly with respect to
remote sensing. He has published in top journals for remote sensing (e.g., Photogrammetric
Engineering and Remote Sensing), Geography (e.g., Annals of the Association of American
Geographers) and ecological modeling (e.g., Ecological Modeling). He has collaborated on and
investigated research funded through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Institutes of Health (NIH),
National Science Foundation (NSF), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and The
European Commission Joint Research Center (JRC). He is also a American Society for
Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Certified Mapping Scientist in remote sensing (CMS-RS #
188) and Robert N. Colwell Memorial Fellow.
Dr. C.D. Lippitt is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at San
Diego State University, where he completed his Ph.D. in Geography in 2012. He also holds a
M.A. in Geographic Information Science and B.A. in Geography from Clark University. He will
join the UNM faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and
Environmental Studies in Fall 2012.
Christopher S. Duvall, Investigator
Dr. Duvall has expertise in the biogeography of multiple plant and animal species, as well as in
the historical and cultural ecology of human-environment interactions across the Atlantic Basin,
from arid West Africa to tropical Central America and the semi-arid American Southwest. He
has published in numerous geography journals, including Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, Journal of Historical Geography, Landscape Ecology, and Journal of
Biogeography.
Dr. Duvall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental
Studies at UNM. He received his Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Wisconsin in 2006,
and his M.S. in Environmental Studies at San Jose State University in 2000.
7
Caitlin L. Lippitt, Investigator
C.L. Lippitt has expertise in biogeography, fire ecology, remote sensing of vegetation, and
geographic information systems, focusing mainly on arid and semi-arid landscapes. She has
published in International Journal of Wildland Fire and International Journal of Applied Earth
Observation and Geoinformation. She has collaborated with several local and national agencies
on ecological monitoring and management research. Funding agencies include San Diego
Association of Governments (SANDAG), City of San Diego Multiple Species Conservation
Program (MSCP), San Diequito River Park, and United States Forest Service (USFS) Pacific
Southwest Research Station.
C.L. Lippitt is currently finishing her Ph.D. in Geography at San Diego State University,
where she also completed her M.S. in Geography in 2007. She will join the UNM faculty as an
Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies in Fall 2013.
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