Chris Laingen

Measuring Cropland Change: A Cautionary Tale

Remotely sensed imagery has been used for decades to quantify the area, rates, and types of land use and land cover change (LULCC) from local to global scales. Common platforms used to capture data include satellite- and aerial-based sensors and cameras. Inseparable from those data are errors—misclassified pixels in sensor-based data or incorrect observations in aerial photographs—created by spectral confusion on the part of the sensor or by misclassifying the raw data during interpretation. Such errors, if not sufficiently explained or taken into consideration when reporting LULCC results, could lead to dubious conclusions. For this article, four commonly used and readily available data sets were analyzed to determine the amount of cropland change in South Dakota from circa 2006 to 2012. Two of the four data sets (the National Land Cover Dataset and the Cropland Data Layer) were created from satellite-based sensors, one was created from photographic data (from the National Agricultural Imaging Program), and the fourth was a survey-based assessment of agricultural land use (Census of Agriculture). Depending on which classes were used or how the data were manipulated prior to calculating areal totals, South Dakota had between 13 million and 19 million acres of cropland in 2012—a difference the size of the state of New Jersey—with rates of change from 2006 to 2012 ranging from 0.28 percent to 22.65 percent.

Expansion of Golf Courses in the United States

ABSTRACT. Twenty‐five million Americans play golf on the nations 16,000 courses each year. These golf courses constitute a significant national landscape feature. Since 1878, when the game arrived in the United States, golf has filtered down the urban, economic, and social hierarchies to become accepted by and accessible to most Americans. During the ensuing thirteen decades the number, location, and layout of the nations golf courses have responded to many of the same driving forces that impacted the nation, including decentralization, growth of the middle class, war, economic depression, suburbanization, and the increasing role of the federal government. Four epochs of golf‐course growth and diffusion show the growing acceptance of the sport and depict where courses were most likely to be constructed as a result of the prevailing forces of each epoch.

Having It Both Ways? Land Use Change in a U.S. Midwestern Agricultural Ecoregion

Urbanization has been directly linked to decreases in area of agricultural lands and, as such, has been considered a threat to food security. Although the area of land used to produce food has diminished, often overlooked have been changes in agricultural output. The Eastern Corn Belt Plains (ECBP) is an important agricultural region in the U.S. Midwest. It has both gained a significant amount of urban land, primarily from the conversion of agricultural land between 1973 and 2000, and at the same time continued to produce ever-increasing quantities of agricultural products. By 2002, more corn, soybeans, and hogs were produced on a smaller agricultural land base than in 1974. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, ECBP ecoregion society appeared to have “had it both ways”: more urbanization along with increased agricultural output.

Human drivers, biophysical changes, and climatic variation affecting contemporary cropping proportions in the northern prairie of the U.S

ABSTRACT Grassland to cropland conversion in the northern prairie of the United States has been a topic of recent land use change studies. Within this region more corn and soybeans are grown now (2017) than in the past, but most studies to date have not examined multi-decadal trends and the synergistic web of socio-ecological driving forces involved, opting instead for short-term analyses and easily targeted agents of change. This paper examines the coalescing of biophysical and socioeconomic driving forces that have brought change to the agricultural landscape of this region between 1980 and 2013. While land conversion has occurred, most of the region’s cropland in 2013 had been previously cropped by the early 1980s. Furthermore, the agricultural conditions in which crops were grown during those three decades have changed considerably because of non-biophysical alterations to production practices and changing agricultural markets. Findings revealed that human drivers played more of a role in crop change than biophysical changes, that blending quantitative and qualitative methods to tell a more complete story of crop change in this region was difficult because of the synergistic characteristics of the drivers involved, and that more research is needed to understand how farmers make crop choice decisions.

A Review of “Rural People and Communities in the 21st Century: Resilience and Transformation"

organizations are attracted to disasters for opportunities to launder illegal money and to commit cybercrime primarily through donation scams. More traditional criminal activities that were experienced include human trafficking, piracy, and illegal logging. In addition to being thoughtfully organized and well written, the book is supported by an excellent set of black-and-white maps, tables, and diagrams. Chapters are suitable for reading assignments in both physical process and disaster management courses. The only criticisms I might offer are the inclusion of an overview map in the introduction identifying the study area for each chapter and the provision of color photographs. This book should be considered required reading for anyone interested in hazards and disaster management.