State Reports - Kansas The Kansas Gap Analysis Project (KS-GAP) is at the beginning of its third fiscal year. The primary cooperators are the Division of Biology and Department of Geography at Kansas State University (KSU) in Manhattan and the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing (KARS) Program and Kansas Biological Survey (KBS) at the University of Kansas (KU) in Lawrence. Jack Cully at KSU continues to serve as the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project, and Edward A. Martinko has become the PI at KU. Glennis Kaufman at KSU continues to serve as the State Coordinator and oversees activities among KARS/KBS, Geography, and Biology. Major accomplishments during the past year include the establishment of partnerships with state and federal agencies, the publication of the first newsletter, the completion of the land cover classification for the pilot area of study, the mapping of lands for stewardship, and the first step towards vertebrate modeling. KS-GAP has developed partnerships with state and federal agencies and the universities involved (KSU and KU). State and federal agencies are interested in acquiring detailed land cover maps of Kansas and/or in applying results of the overlay of data within a GIS system for management of natural resources. Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-Region VII, the GIS State Policy Board (through the Kansas Water Office), and the Natural Resources Conservation Service have made funding commitments. In addition, we have received in-kind support from the National Aeronautic Space Administration (NASA). This ongoing support from NASA is a significant contribution of satellite imagery over Kansas. The first issue (Winter 1997) of the KS-GAP newsletter, Kansas Maps and Gaps, was produced in March. The newsletter will be published on a semi-annual schedule. Kansas Maps and Gaps was sent to over 350 individuals and agencies. The response was very favorable. During this past year, KARS completed the pilot land cover project of KS-GAP which focused on a ten-county area in southwest Kansas. Our mapping methodology was a two-stage or hybrid process using multiseasonal Thematic Mapper imagery (late spring, early summer, and late summer). In the first stage, unsupervised classification was used to separate crop land from natural vegetation. In the second stage, supervised classification was used to map the natural vegetation classes. We currently are evaluating post-classification methodologies to refine the classification accuracies of some of the classes mapped, including floodplain woodland and Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) grasslands. Also, during the past year, KARS/KBS has published a detailed vegetation classification system for Kansas, preprocessed about 50% of the satellite imagery remaining to map land cover in Kansas, and presented results and exchanged ideas on methodologies at a number of conferences. An ancillary project to identify lesser prairie chicken habitat is under way in southwest Kansas. This project is conducted by a KARS graduate research assistant and will contribute to the land cover map of Kansas. During this past year, the Geography Department at KSU traced the boundaries for 196 managed areas in Kansas onto Mylar and then scanned these data into a GIS stewardship layer. Attribute data, including the name, owner, and manager of the area, also were attached. We estimate that this layer is 80% complete. We now are in the process of contacting local, state, and federal agencies to determine if additional areas exist that need to be added to the database. Work on the vertebrate layer is beginning in summer 1997 with the initiation of species lists for mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians which include species element codes, scientific names, common names, and state and federal ranks and status. We also are beginning to work on habitat relationships for mammals in southwest Kansas (the area of the pilot project) based on literature review. We plan to hire several graduate students in the fall to begin work on development of habitat relationships for birds, reptiles, and amphibians in southwest Kansas. An ancillary project, a digitized soil map produced by Geography at KSU for the state of Kansas, is expected to be used to help model vertebrate distributions in Kansas. |