Range & Training Land Assessment (RTLA) at Fort Riley, Kansas

Overview

The focus of the RTLA program is to collect physical and biological data from training areas on military land in order to support sustainable training use of military lands.

Background

Range and Training Land Assessment (RTLA), originally designated Land Condition Trend Analysis (LCTA), was developed by the US Army and implemented on over 50 installations in the early 1990s. A major component of this program has been to monitor trends in plant and animal communities so that managers could maintain quality training lands without the loss of ecological diversity. Fort Riley established permanent plots starting in 1991 following the guidelines provided by LCTA I (Tazik et al. 1992) focusing on vegetation, breeding birds, and small mammals in grassland and woodland habitats. In 2000, a research contract with Kansas State University through the Kansas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit was established to focus on evaluating the long-term data sets and appropriateness of the field protocols to assess land condition at Fort Riley.

Objectives

1) To understand how plants, animals and soils respond to military training and to study the long-term trends in sustainability of ecological systems.

2) To provide scientific data that documents biological population trends and to provide a basis for evaluating the condition of lands subjective to military training activities on Fort Riley.

Approach

Monitoring

Using a serially augmented alternating (SAA) panel design, areas subjected to wheeled and tracked vehicle disturbance are being monitored using 1-hectare plots.

A low-level aerial photography system is used to measure non-woody vegetation cover, bare ground area and erosion to monitor soil disturbance on the 1-hectare plots.

Research

A Vehicle Maneuvering Experiment will be conducted over a period of 10 years on Special Use Plots using tracked and wheeled vehicles. This work is scheduled to begin in April 2007.

The response that various ecological properties such as vegetation, soil, arthropods and small mammal communities have to the controlled disturbance will be measured and the resilience of these properties after disturbance has ceased will be examined.

Additional Projects

Pilot studies are being conducted to assess current field protocols and develop methodologies to address specific research objectives.

Breeding bird surveys are conducted during the breeding season (May-June) to document species richness and to examine trends in populations of small landbirds. This is a long-term study (17 years) that was initially established as a part of the LCTA project.