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Abstract: The Rocky Mountain West is experiencing rapid land use change in the form of residential development. Public land managers, like the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service are increasingly concerned with ecological and management implications of private land use adjacent to public lands. Using fine-grain land use data, collected from high resolution aerial photographs, we quantify human land use composition, patterns, and trends at the interface of public and private land in the Southern Rocky Mountain Ecoregion (SRE) of Colorado. We developed two metrics for assessing land use impacts. The first quantifies the amount of land cover modified (HMc) by human land use and the second estimates the amount of wildlife habitat that is functionally modified (HMfd). In 2005, we estimate that human land use modifies 8% of the total land cover in the Colorado SRE and that 13% of the study area was functionally modified. Agriculture had the greatest impact in terms of area of modified land cover (282,305ha). Residential (exurban) land use had a smaller footprint (HMc) but the close proximity to public lands, dispersed spatial pattern (high HMfd), and rapid increase in rural and exurban housing density observed in the SRE have important implications. This research demonstrates how fine scale land cover data can be used to examine land use pattern and composition as well as track land use change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management and conservation of large carnivores increasingly includes conflicts with humans. Consequently, a greater understanding of spatiotemporal trends of conflicts is needed to efficiently allocate resources and apply targeted management. Therefore, we examined spatial and temporal distribution of American black bear (Ursus americanus; hereafter, bear)-human conflicts in Colorado, USA, related to 3 conflict types (agriculture operations, human development, and road kills). We used the Getis-Ord Gi* spatial clustering statistic to describe location and assess magnitude of bear-human conflicts in Colorado during 1986-2003 and investigated temporal trends of bear- human conflicts by type. Bear-human conflicts showed distinct spatial clustering by type, and areas of high clustering overlapped conflict types. Clustering for agriculture operations conflicts had the largest overall Gi* value and overlapped counties with high sheep production. Both human development and road-kill conflict clusters were high in areas of high-quality oak (Quercus spp.)-shrub habitat in the central and southern portions of Colorado's Front Range region and near the city of Durango in southwestern Colorado. Bear-human conflicts varied by year and type but overall increased during the 18 years. Summed across years, most conflicts were related to agriculture (32%), followed by road kills (27%) and human development (24%). The greatest proportion of agriculture operations-related conflicts (76%), human development- related conflicts (36%), and road kills (47%) occurred in 1988, 1999, and 2003, respectively. Considering that bear-human conflicts in Colorado increased over time and will likely continue to increase, we suggest wildlife managers improve data collection by obtaining detailed location data, categorizing conflict types uniformly, and applying conflict regulations consistently to strengthen inference of similar analyses. We also suggest that managers target efforts to mitigate damage by focusing on areas with high clustering of conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation of private land through conservation easements, development agreements, and clustered housing has increased greatly as have criticisms of the laws, public programs, and incentives that motivate landowners to use them. Rapid land-use change at the urban–rural interface in Larimer County, Colorado, has given rise to programs that provide a variety of land-conservation options for landowners. As of January 2005, roughly 60% of Larimer County was publicly owned, and 3% or 16,200 ha was privately owned with some form of protection. We used document analysis, a landowner survey, targeted interviews, and a landscape-level spatial analysis to analyze the patterns, quantities, and qualities of private land conservation. We created a jurisdiction-specific typology of desired benefits from local government-planning documents to help evaluate conservation parcels. Most easements and other conservation documents used general terms and did not describe the site-specific values of the land being conserved. Landowners were able to describe some benefits not included in parcel-specific documents, and our spatial analysis revealed parcel-specific and cumulative conservation benefits such as the amount of buffering, infill, connectivity, protected agricultural land, riparian protection, and other benefits not referenced by either documents or landowners. Conservation benefits provided by a parcel varied depending on its geographic location, the specific institution such as a land trust or open space program that a landowner worked with, and the conservation mechanism used, such as voluntary easement or residential clustering requirements. The methods we used provide a template for jurisdictions wishing to undertake a similar analysis. Our findings may assist other jurisdictions and institutions interested in improving how land-conservation benefits are described; justify and inform future investments in private land conservation; assist local governments and other institutions with the assessment of program effectiveness; and be useful for conservation planners who wish to become more involved in on-the-ground implementation of conservation actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire-prone landscapes are increasingly being settled. Monitoring this development is an emerging need, and a low-cost method would benefit emergency managers. Existing change- detection methods can be expensive and time consuming when applied to low-density urban change in large, vegetated areas. Nighttime satellite imagery is explored as means for addressing this problem, and a case study is presented for Colorado. The results indicate that from 1992-2000, Grand County had the greatest absolute increase in ambient sprawl into fire-prone areas (215 km²), but Teller County had the greatest percentage increase (7.3 percent). In 2000, La Plata County had the most ambient development in fire-prone areas (909 km²), but Jefferson County had the greatest percentage (42 percent). The paper concludes with a discussion of the prospects and problems of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses a general approach to estimate the cumulative effects of land use change on wildlife habitat using Summit County, Colorado, as a case study. Effects of development on wildlife and wildlife habitat; Development density and pattern; Density-disturbance functional relationship; Fragmentation of habitat caused by development.