Human culture and policy play an important role in structuring landscape patterns. Agriculture is an example of a land use practice that has altered landscape patterns worldwide and agricultural intensification coupled with broad patterns in land use change have resulted in decreased cover of native plant communities and a loss in biodiversity. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was developed to assist private landowners in offsetting negative impacts of agricultural practices through government subsidies. To understand the contribution of currently enrolled CRP lands to broadscale landscape patterns, we used FRAGSTATS to assess patch- and class- scale landscape patterns in relation to grasslands across the state of Oklahoma at the statewide and ecoregion extents. At the statewide extent, CRP lands accounted for little change in grassland patterns, with only a 3.1% gain in grassland core area and 5.8% decrease in patchiness (number of patches). However, when assessed at the ecoregion extent, CRP lands contributed to significantly greater changes in grassland core area within the High Plains ecoregion (29.5% gain), while decreasing the patchiness in the High Plains and the Southwestern Tablelands (39.9% and 44.7%, respectively). Furthermore, our results suggest that the spatial arrangement of CRP lands within these ecoregions influences the overall change in patch configuration. For example, the proximity index of CRP lands is more influential in affecting grassland connectivity when compared to the overall coverage (%) of CRP lands within an ecoregion. Our results outline the importance of accounting for scale when assessing the impact of CRP lands on grassland landscape patterns.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.