MONITORING LANDSCAPE CHANGE AND SOCIOECONOMIC PRESSURES IN COLORADO'S ENERGY ALLEY: FACTORS INFLUENCING LAND-USE DEVELOPMENT

The nature of federal and local land-use management and development decisions in the 21^st Century are fundamentally being challenged from pressures such as unprecedented energy demand, rapid population growth, increased human presence in the Wildland-Urban Land Interface (WUI), demographic shifts, human migration and socioeconomic changes (University of Montana, 2008).

Understanding the factors influencing historical and future land transformations are required for establishing land-use model parameterization and business rules for simulating future land-use change and evaluating socioeconomic impacts and natural resource management decisions from those modeled simulations.

The land-surface upon which these land-use development patterns, housing types, and population distribution evolve is the result of various social, economic, and physiographic factors.

Investigating the factors that are driving, enabling, constraining, shaping, and sustaining these patterns and threshold densities provide a framework and structure to gaining insight into the variables that contributed to a region’s land-use history and are potentially prerequisites for modeling future landscape change. Retrospective assessment of factors influencing land-use development in Grand Valley, Colorado, and how these results can be used in forecasting future landscape change will be discussed.

For example, a driving factor is defined as an agent that encourages or induces landscape change. Demographic (population) and economic (employment) are considered major drivers of land-use development. Colorado’s Garfield and Mesa counties; which fall within the geographic region known as “Energy Alley”, are primed for growth and urbanization with a projected population increase of 72-percent or about 156,000 additional residents by the year 2035 (Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado, 2008) which coincides approximately with the future horizon year for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Grand Junction Field Office’s (GJFO) Resource Management Plan (RMP).

Transportation features such as roads and telecommunications are classified as factors that enable access to undeveloped land and encourage land-use development. Dispersion of land-use patterns and housing types on the land-surface is influenced by the distance and speed that humans can commute from residence to workplace as well as from residence to cultural/natural amenities for recreational purposes. The location of Walker Field in Mesa County as a regional airport and Interstate Highway 70 are enabling factors bringing an influx of temporary visitors and permanent residents attracted to the amenities within the BLM GJFO Resource Management Plan Planning Area (RMPPA).

In coordination with BLM’s revision of their 1985-vintage GJFO RMP, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Rocky Mountain Geographic Science Center (RMGSC) will collaborate with the BLM GJFO on using the RMP alternative development scenarios and the RMPPA as the geographic jurisdiction for understanding the factors influencing community growth and simulating future land-use development change internal as well as external to the region.

References Cited:

Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado, 2008, Northwest Colorado Socioeconomic Analysis and Forecasts, BBC Research and Consulting, p. 179.

University of Montana School of Law and Public Policy Research Institute, 2008, A Federal Public Lands Agenda for the 21^st Century, National Advisory Board Public Land and Resources Law Review, Policy Report 6, p. 43.