Rural, forested areas throughout the United States are experiencing strong housing growth with potentially detrimental impacts on the environment. In this paper, we quantify housing growth in Northern Wisconsin over the last sixty years to determine if growth rates were higher near public lands, which may represent an important recreational amenity. We used data from the U.S. Census to produce decadal housing density estimates, ''backcasts,'' from 1940 to 2000 for northern Wisconsin to examine ''rural sprawl'' in northern Wisconsin and its relationship to forested areas and public lands. We integrated housing density estimates with the 1992/1993 National Land Cover Dataset to examine the relationship between rural sprawl and land cover, especially forests. Between 1940 and 2000, private land with <2 housing units/km2 decreased from 47% to 21% of the total landscape. Most importantly, housing growth was concentrated along the boundaries of public lands. In 14 of the 19 counties that we studied, housing growth rates within 1 km of a public land boundary exceeded growth rates in the remainder of the county, and three of the five counties that did not exhibit this pattern, were the ones with the least amount of public land. Future growth can be expected in areas with abundant natural amenities, highlighting the critical need for additional research and effective natural resource management and regional planning to address these challenges
File: Hammer-etal_JEM_2010.pdf
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L andscapes are shaped by complex relationships between human population, social structure, and environmental conditions. T raditionally, these factors have been studied separately within their respective disciplines. Few studies explore the relationship between indicators of social structure and ecological factors. Our objective was to examine the relationship between housing density, as recorded in the U.S. Census data, and a satellite land-cover classification in the northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens region. We used a geographical information system (GIS) to integrate these two data sets. Our results revealed strong patterns. For example, housing densities were higher where water is more abundant , a possible case where land cover influences housing density. In other cases, housing density appears to influence land cover. T hese complex relationships are discussed. Our approach represents an initial methodology to integrate social and ecological data, a task needed to improve our understanding of rural societies and to facilitate broad-scale ecosystem management.
File: Radeloff_etal_SNR2000.pdf
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Housing growth is prevalent in rural areas in the United States and landscape fragmentation is one of its many effects. Since the 1930s, rural sprawl has been increasing in areas rich in recreational amenities. The question is how housing growth has affected landscape fragmentation. We thus tested three hypotheses relating land cover and land ownership to density and spatial pattern of buildings, and examined whether building density or spatial pattern of buildings was a better predictor for landscape fragmentation. Housing locations were mapped from 117 1:24,000-scale USGS topographic maps across northern Wisconsin. Patch-level landscape metrics were calculated on the terrestrial area remaining after applying 50, 100 and 250 m disturbance zones around each building. Our results showed that building density and the spatial pattern of buildings were affected mostly by lake area, public land ownership, and the abundance of coniferous forest, agricultural land, and grassland. A full 40% of the houses were within 100 m of lakeshores. The clustering of buildings within 100 m of lakeshores limited fragmentation farther away. In contrast, agricultural and grassland areas were correlated with higher building density, higher fragmentation, and more dispersed building pattern possible legacies of agricultural settlement patterns. Understanding which factors influence building density and fragmentation is useful for landscape level planning and ecosystem management in northern Wisconsin and areas that share similar social and environmental constraints.
File: Gonzalez_etal_LE_2007.pdf
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Roads remove habitat, alter adjacent areas, and interrupt and redirect ecological flows. They subdivide wildlife populations, foster invasive species spread, change the hydrologic network, and increase human use of adjacent areas. At broad scales, these impacts cumulate and define landscape patterns. The goal of this study was to improve our understanding of the dynamics of road networks over time, and their effects on landscape patterns, and identify significant relationships between road changes and other land-use changes. We mapped roads from aerial photographs from five dates between 1937 and 1999 in 17 townships in predominantly forested landscapes in northern Wisconsin, USA. Patch-level landscape metrics were calculated on terrestrial area outside of a 15-m road-effect zone. We used generalized leastsquares regression models to relate changes in road density and landscape pattern to concurrent changes in housing density. Rates of change and relationships were compared among three ecological regions. Our results showed substantial increases in both road density and landscape fragmentation during the study period. Road density more than doubled, and median, mean, and largest patch size were reduced by a factor of four, while patch shape became more regular. Increases in road density varied significantly among ecological subsections and were positively related to increases in housing density. Fragmentation was largely driven by increases in road density, but housing density had a significantly positive relationship with largest patch area and patch shape. Without protection of roadless areas, our results suggest road development is likely to continue in the future, even in areas where road construction is constrained by the physical environment. Recognizing the dynamic nature of road networks is important for understanding and predicting their ecological impacts over time and understanding where other types of development are likely to occur in the future. Historical perspectives of development can provide guidance in prioritizing management efforts to defragment landscapes and mitigate the ecological impacts of past road development.
File: Hawbaker_etal_EA_2006_0.pdf
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The spatial deconcentration of population during the 20th century and the resulting expansion of human settlements has been a significant cause of anthropogenic landscape change in the United States and many other countries. In the seven-state North Central Region, as in other regions of the US, changing human settlement patterns are most prominent at the outlying fringe of metropolitan areas and in rural regions with attractive recreational and aesthetic amenities. This process of growth and change has profound implications for the ecology of the region that will require the reformulation of resource management policies. We use attribute clustering of both housing density and housing growth for each decade from 1940 to 1990 to illuminate the dynamic process of housing density change in the North Central Region. While cross-sectional housing density maps display the uniformity of residential density within urban, suburban, and rural areas, historic density clustering demonstrates the spatial variability of density trajectories in urban and suburban areas, and the relative stability and homogeneity of more rural density trajectories. Clusters based on housing growth, without regard to absolute density, reveal similarities between urban cores and rural areas, where in both cases, housing growth has been very slow in recent decades. We identify density/growth clusters with high potential for future growth, which are spatially clustered on the periphery of metropolitan areas, in smaller urban centers, and in recreational areas throughout the region.
File: Hammer_etal_LUP2004.pdf
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In this article, we provide an overview of the demographic trends that have impacted and will continue to impact the ''wicked'' wildfire management problem in the United States, with particular attention to the emergence of the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Although population growth has had an impact on the emergence of the WUI, the deconcentration of population and housing, amenity-driven population growth in select nonmetropolitan counties, and interregional population shifts to the West and Southeast have had and will continue to have much greater impacts. In the coming decades, we can expect the retirement of the baby boom generation to exacerbate these trends.
File: Hammer_2009_SocNatRes.pdf
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Periodic wildfire is an important natural process in Mediterranean-climate ecosystems, but increasing fire recurrence threatens the fragile ecology of these regions. Because most fires are human-caused, we investigated how human population patterns affect fire frequency. Prior research in California suggests the relationship between population density and fire frequency is not linear. There are few human ignitions in areas with low population density, so fire frequency is low. As population density increases, human ignitions and fire frequency also increase, but beyond a density threshold, the relationship becomes negative as fuels become sparser and fire suppression resources are concentrated. We tested whether this hypothesis also applies to the other Mediterranean-climate ecosystems of the world. We used global satellite databases of population, fire activity, and land cover to evaluate the spatial relationship between humans and fire in the world's five Mediterranean-climate ecosystems. Both the mean and median population densities were consistently and substantially higher in areas with than without fire, but fire again peaked at intermediate population densities, which suggests that the spatial relationship is complex and nonlinear. Some land-cover types burned more frequently than expected, but no systematic differences were observed across the five regions. The consistent association between higher population densities and fire suggests that regardless of differences between land-cover types, natural fire regimes, or overall population, the presence of people in Mediterranean-climate regions strongly affects the frequency of fires; thus, population growth in areas now sparsely settled presents a conservation concern. Considering the sensitivity of plant species to repeated burning and the global conservation significance of Mediterranean-climate ecosystems, conservation planning needs to consider the human influence on fire frequency. Fine-scale spatial analysis of relationships between people and fire may help identify areas where increases in fire frequency will threaten ecologically valuable areas.
File: Syphard_2009_ConsBio.pdf
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In the United States, housing density has substantially increased in and adjacent to forests. Our goal in this study was to identify how housing density and human populations are associated with avian diversity. We compared these associations to those between landscape pattern and avian diversity, and we examined how these associations vary across the conterminous forested United States. Using data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, the U.S. Census, and the National Land Cover Database, we focused on forest and woodland bird communities and conducted our analysis at multiple levels of model specificity, first using a coarse-thematic resolution (basic models), then using a larger number of fine-thematic resolution variables (refined models). We found that housing development was associated with forest bird species richness in all forested ecoregions of the conterminous United States. However, there were important differences among ecoregions. In the basic models, housing density accounted for ,5% of variance in avian species richness. In refined models, 85% of models included housing density and/or residential land cover as significant variables. The strongest guild response was demonstrated in the Adirondack-New England ecoregion, where 29% of variation in richness of the permanent resident guild was associated with housing density. Model improvements due to regional stratification were most pronounced for cavity nesters and short-distance migrants, suggesting that these guilds may be especially sensitive to regional processes. The varying patterns of association between avian richness and attributes associated with landscape structure suggested that landscape context was an important mediating factor affecting how biodiversity responds to landscape changes. Our analysis suggested that simple, broadly applicable, land use recommendations cannot be derived from our results. Rather, anticipating future avian response to land use intensification (or reversion to native vegetation) has to be conditioned on the current landscape context and the species group of interest. Our results show that housing density and residential land cover were significant predictors of forest bird species richness, and their prediction strengths are likely to increase as development continues.
File: pidgeon_etal_ecap_07.pdf
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The US Census provides the primary source of spatially explicit social data, but changing block boundaries complicate analyses of housing growth over time. We compared procedures for reconciling housing density data between 1990 and 2000 census block boundaries in order to assess the sensitivity of analytical methods to estimates of housing growth in Oregon. Estimates of housing growth varied substantially and were sensitive to the method of interpolation. With no processing and areal-weighted interpolation, more than 35% of the landscape changed; 75-80% of this change was due to decline in housing density. This decline was implausible, however, because housing structures generally persist over time. Based on aggregated boundaries, 11% of the landscape changed, but only 4% experienced a decline in housing density. Nevertheless, the housing density change map was almost twice as coarse spatially as the 2000 housing density data. We also applied a dasymetric approach to redistribute 1990 housing data into 2000 census boundaries under the assumption that the distribution of housing in 2000 reflected the same distribution as in 1990. The dasymetric approach resulted in conservative change estimates at a fine resolution. All methods involved some type of trade-off (e.g. analytical difficulty, data resolution, magnitude or bias in direction of change). However, our dasymetric procedure is a novel approach for assessing housing growth over changing census boundaries that may be particularly useful because it accounts for the uniquely persistent nature of housing over time.
File: nrs_2009_syphard_001.pdf
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Identifying areas of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) that are prone to severe wildfire is an important step in prioritizing fire prevention and preparedness projects. Our objective is to determine at a regional scale the relative risk of severe wildfire in WUI areas and the numbers of people and houses in high-risk areas. For a study area in northern lower Michigan, we first develop a spatial database of WUI areas (both intermix and interface) using housing data from the 2000 US Census and 1994 vegetation data from the Gap Analysis Project of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Then, we develop a spatial database of historic (pre-1900) fire regimes and current (1994) fuels to identify areas with high risk of standreplacing fires. High-risk areas historically supported jack pine (P. banksiana Lamb.) and mixed pine forests with stand-replacing fire rotations less than 100 years and currently support upland conifer and hardwood forests. Analysis of the databases shows that 26% of the study area is WUI. About 25% of the WUI has relatively high fire risk. Over 88% of the WUI with high fire risk has low housing density (<1 house per 2 ha) and is classified as intermix where fuels and structures intermingle. The predominance of high-risk intermix areas with low-density housing has implications for planning effective fuel treatments and evacuation plans.
File: Haight_etal_JOF_2004.pdf
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