The Disappearing West

GIS Programming - Participation Assignment #1

Every 2.5 minutes the American West loses a football field worth of natural area to human development.  With less than 12% of land in the west under protection from development and resource extraction, a team of scientists, some of the top researchers in landscape ecology and conservation biology, at the nonprofit Conservation Science Partners (CSP) analyzed nearly 3 dozen datasets, a dozen types of human activity and more than a decade of satellite imagery for 11 western states, to answer the questions; How fast is the United States losing natural resources in the west, and, most importantly, why?  Established methods were used to map the degree of human modification at high spatial resolution and to estimate the amount of natural loss between 2001-2006 and 2006-2011.  The central dataset used in this project is the National Land Cover Dataset.

Between 2001 and 2011 approximately 4300 square miles of natural areas disappeared because of development.  This loss amounts to an area larger than Yellowstone Nation Park.  Wyoming and Utah were hit the hardest of the 11 states.  Between 2001 and 2011 they had the largest percent of change in area from human development.

Three quarters of natural areas in the west that have disappeared were caused by development on private lands.  Many state lands are managed primarily for energy and timber extraction.  They also lost large areas to development.  Federal lands fared better than state lands in protecting natural areas.  National parks , in particular, did the best among all ownership categories in having the lowest proportion of land converted to development.

GIS was instrumental in tracking and analyzing all this data.  The approach, data, and analytical methods used to estimate natural land loss in the western U.S. can be viewed here:  https://www.disappearingwest.org/methodology.pdf

For the full article on this project follow this link:  https://www.disappearingwest.org/