REPRESENTING LAND USE & VEGETATION CHANGE OVER TIME FOR SOIL CARBON ANALYSIS IN THE PIEDMONT REGION, NC

Forest soils have the potential to sequester substantial amounts of carbon for long periods of time. However, previous studies have demonstrated that a legacy of agricultural use influences this ecosystem service. The Elon University Forest is a 56 acre mixed hardwood-conifer forest with a mixed-use history of agricultural and old growth in the Piedmont ecoregion of North Carolina. This project involved the development of a geospatial database of land use change and analysis of land use trajectories over an 83 year span in the Elon Forest. Aerial photographs from the years 1939, 1951, 1974, 1984, 1996, 2010, and 2022 were georeferenced and classified by land use/land cover categories using ArcGIS software. Land use trajectories were identified using raster analysis and a classification tree. This analysis identified seven broad categories of trajectories, with pine transitioning to mixed or hardwood being the largest. 42% of the area has been used for row crop or pasture during this period and 12% consists of forest area that was possibly never cleared. These trajectories will be used in a stratified random sampling for future analysis of the soil organic carbon held within the forest’s soil based on differing land use legacies.