PARENT SESSION
Oral Session # 11: Ecological Studies on Military Installations.
Presiding: B Collins
Monday, August 4. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, SITCC Meeting Room 203.
The quest for measures of site condition in a military installation context.
Balbach, Harold*,1, Goran, William1, 1 US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Champaign, IL
ABSTRACT- The SERDP Ecosystem Management Project (SEMP) is a Department of Defense research program, conducted at Ft. Benning, GA, that includes a suite of projects, each pursuing a specific hypothesis. Overall, the program proposes to assist military installation land managers to better understand and manage their lands for sustainable mission use and proactive stewardship. Adaptive management methodologies and tools will be developed, based on relating SEMP research findings to management concerns. Field research was initiated by multiple teams in 1999, after a competitive selection process. Each team originally selected study sites with reference only to that team's hypothesis. Qualitative designations (e.g., low, medium, and high disturbance) of relative condition were adequate for each team to differentiate their sites. When the need arose to be able to relate the site condition among all sites, these qualitative, relative designations broke down. The terrestrial and aquatic site condition indices were developed, with participation from all the research teams, as a framework for comparison across sites from all research teams. Based on this starting point, elements such as vegetation structure, soil compaction, microfloral populations, plant productivity, soil and sediment carbon, historical land use to the extent knowable, surface cover, and others, some of which were already a focus of SEMP study, were identified as a basis for index development. This presentation will examine these indices, and evaluate their effectiveness for cross-site comparisons, and their applicability beyond this unique context.
Key words: site condition, land use, military training, ecosystem