Wither King Cotton in Mississippi? Land Cover Dynamics Reveal Change to Pine Plantations in the Loess Hills

J. A. Griffith

Department of Geography, University of Southern Mississippi

The amount of forest land in the Mississippi Valley Loess Plains and Southeastern Plains Ecoregions has shown a steady or slightly increasing amount of forest land cover. Data from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Land Cover Trends Project, which is documenting land use and land cover change over the last 30 years, has shown forest decreases in many ecoregions in the eastern United States. Thus, these two ecoregions appear to be somewhat of an anomaly. The work presented here is based on a time-series analysis of five dates of Landsat imagery from the early 1970s to 2000. The images covered 32 ten x ten km sample blocks throughout the imagery. Manual interpretation of the imagery, along with ancillary data, aerial photography, and field reconnaissance has shown that the Loess Plains ecoregion is a dynamic landscape, with approximately 13% of the landscape changing over time. Much of the change was associated with growth in urbanized land at the expense of agricultural land. However, there was also a significant conversion of agricultural land to forest as well. Field visits to the sample blocks revealed a landscape filled with many pine plantations, and we hypothesize that some this transition has taken place on cotton fields, other cropland, and pastures. In addition, timber harvesting has increased since the early 1970’s and was the dominant land use change in the period 1992-2000.

Keywords: Land Use/Land Cover Change, Remote Sensing, Landscape Monitoring

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