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CIPEC's south-central Indiana location is characterized by temperate deciduous forests with rolling topography. In the early 1800's, the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) was used to partition the landscape into a regular arrangement of parcels which were allocated to settlers (largely of European descent migrating from areas south and east of Indiana). Prior to this wave of settlement most of the state was forested with the exception of areas in the Northwest portion of the state that were in wetlands. By 1900 much of the Indiana landscape was deforested as settlers cleared land for timber, pasturing and row crops. Estimates of forest cover in 1900-1910 are around 5-10%. From 1900-1950 much of the land cleared for agricultural production was abandoned and has since regrown into forest cover. Today, about 20% of the state is in forest cover. Most of which is located in south-central Indiana where topographic conditions make many areas less suitable for agricultural production in comparison to the northern part of the state. Many townships in this south-central area are currently more than 50% forested, particularly those with large areas in publicly managed state and federal forests. The CIPEC Indiana location represents one of the few CIPEC sites where appreciable reforestation has occurred.
CIPEC researchers have used a variety of methods to explore this process of deforestation and reforestation. Household surveys have been conducted in Monroe County (south-central Indiana) and Dekalb County (Northeast Indiana) to explore the dynamics of household level decision making and incentives for different landuse decisions. Multi-scale socio-economic data have also been collected at the block, tract and county level as part of econometric modeling efforts. These demographic datasets are complemented by rich historical agricultural census data that provide price data for row crops and timber.
These socio-economic datasets are integrated with multi-temporal landcover data derived from aerial photography and satellite imagery in a GIS framework. Ancillary GIS datasets such as topographic, hydrographic and transportation data are used to include land suitability factors in our analyses.
This empirical work is complemented by a substantial modeling effort associated with a CIPEC NSF Biocomplexity project (link). This modeling initiative is used in integration with the household surveys, GIS and RS data analysis as a means to explore potential hypotheses for landcover change drivers and as a tool to inform subsequent data collection efforts. This interplay between empirical data analysis and modeling provides a rich analytical framework to explore relationships in complex social-ecological systems.
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Indiana
forests: a view from below
Indiana
Nine-County Study Region 1997 TM Landsat Satellite Image bands 5,4,3
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