HR: 1340h
AN: B13D-1525    [Abstracts]
TI: Towards an Operational Vegetation Health Monitoring System for the Northern Great Plains
AU: * Aloysius, N
EM: noel.aloysius@yale.edu
AF: Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 210 Prospect St, New Haven, CT 06511, United States
AU: Kim, H J
EM: hkim@und.edu
AF: Center for People and Environment, Clifford Hall Rm 300 4149 University Ave Stop 9011, Grand Forks, ND 58202, United States
AB: Farmers and Rangers in the Northern Great Plains (NGP) of the United States had been devastated by the extremely dry weather conditions in the summer of 2006. The entire state of North Dakota was declared a primary agricultural disaster area in September, 2006 by the US Department of Agriculture. Emergency grazing on CRP lands was extended in several NGP states. On the contrary, the summer of 2005 had been exceptionally wet in certain parts of NGP which ruined crops. The occurrences of these weather extremes severely affect the natural resource based enterprises like farming and ranching, the effects of which ripple through the economies of several states in the region. In order to monitor and assess the impacts of these extreme events and to take mitigation strategies, variety of physical and environmental conditions have to be taken into consideration. Remote sensing based vegetation indices such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI), climate information and drought indices are employed to assess the growth of vegetation and its vigor, both spatially and temporally. A 25-year history of NDVI and seven-year history of EVI data were used to develop a near real-time vegetation growth monitoring system for the five Northern Great Plains states (ID, MT, ND, SD and WY). The EVI and EVI anomaly, computed based on 2000-2005 averages, are updated twice monthly for the growing season, April through September. In addition, precipitation anomalies based on a 30-year average and Palmer Z-index (a short term moisture availability index) are also updated monthly for the 45 climate divisions within the NGP states. The presentation will highlight how the near real-time monitoring of the combination of vegetation and climate parameters can help to identify the temporal and spatial patterns of vegetation dynamics at different spatial (from individual farms, climate divisions to states and, even, the whole NGP region) and temporal (monthly to growing season) scales. This information can be used by several stakeholders in the region including individual land managers, farmers and ranchers. We will also discuss how this information is disseminated through the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium's "learning community" approach. In addition, how additional information like growing degree days can be incorporated in order to provide a better decision support tool to the end users in the region will also be discussed.
UR: http://www.umac.org/drought/
DE: 0402 Agricultural systems
DE: 0439 Ecosystems, structure and dynamics (4815)
DE: 0470 Nutrients and nutrient cycling (4845, 4850)
DE: 0480 Remote sensing
DE: 0800 EDUCATION
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting