Excerpt
People find it difficult to imagine a future that is very different from the present, but nearly any series of U.S. Department of Agriculture aerial photos taken over the past 50 years in the Corn Belt shows dramatic landscape change. Farmsteads, pastures and woodlots disappear, and cultivated fields grow to a size that would have been unimaginable in 1950. It is usually only in retrospect that people can see how much things can change.
To look 25 years into the future and imagine how Corn Belt landscapes could change allows us to critically evaluate the potential consequences of the surprising character of the future. In this project, we used future landscape scenario studies to imagine how different policy choices could influence alternative futures for Corn Belt landscapes in 2025. Three alternative futures are compared with a 1994 base landscape for their potential effects on ecological functions, hydrological functions, economic return, and public acceptance of the alternative landscapes1
Study areas
In an iterative interdisciplinary GIS-based process”, we developed three alternative scenarios for Corn Belt agricultural landscapes in the year 2025, and mapped them for two second-order watersheds that exemplify different soil and relief conditions in Iowa. Buck …
Footnotes
Joan Iverson Nassauer, Robert C. Corry are with the School of Natural Resources & Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan and Richard M. Cruse is with the Agronomy Department, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.
- Copyright 2002 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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