Locations and environments of U.S. army training and testing lands: An ecoregional framework for assessment

Abstract

The U.S. Army manages over 12 million acres of federal training and testing lands contained within military installations throughout the 50 United States. These lands are a critical national asset for defense readiness, dedicated to providing realistic training and testing environments for army units and equipment. The locations and physiographic diversity of the Army's current land inventory is a function of historical precedent, modern-day land expansions, and requirements for strategic projection of forces. Many Army lands are relatively undeveloped, providing important ecological settings for a variety of flora and fauna, including many threatened and endangered species. As a responsible land steward, the Army is committed to protection and sustainable use of these natural resources, with concurrent benefit to both the army and the public. Army training and testing activities can cause environmental impacts that may be detrimental to the long-term sustainment of ecological functions. These realities pose significant land management challenges to the Army. The application of established ecologicalframeworks for strategically assessing land-use impacts and land management approaches is demonstrated for 31 major Army installations, using Bailey's “ecoregion classification system,” developed by the U.S. Forest Service. The Ecoregions framework is used to (1) classify and catalog the ecological diversity of Army lands, (2) provide a comparative framework for assessing land resiliencyfrom Army impacts, and (3) extrapolate knowledge of perturbed ecosystem behavior and response from one army installation to others in similar ecoregions.