Characterizing Land Use Change Trends Around the Perimeter of Military Installations

Abstract : The Total Army Basing Study (TABS) office, as one aspect of their stationing study, wished to determine the rate of development near the boundaries of nearly 100 military installations throughout the United States. The Engineer Research and Development Center proposed that this could be done by comparing the urbanization as derived from Ikonos images (taken around 2003 and acquired for all Services through the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) to a digital land use data set developed by the United States Geological Survey in about 1992. This decade difference could then be used to determine not only the amount of development, but also the trend. For the military, increasing development near installation boundaries can limit the ability to carry out their primary responsibilities of military training readiness and material testing activities. A team of 10 professionals was able to carry out the analysis for all the installations in about 4 months. This document describes the standard procedure used and the generalized results for the trends in increased development near the installation boundaries. It also summaries the urbanization trends from the statistics generated to provide a snapshot of encroachment characteristics near a sample of nearly 100 military installations.