Human Development in the Lower Kenai River Watershed, 1950-2013 - Interactive Slider Graphic

The expanding footprint of human development in the lower Kenai River watershed based on analysis of aerial photographs. Inset in top panel shows location within entire Kenai River watershed (dark outline). Most development is concentrated in the lowlands near the river mainstem and tributaries.

An interactive slider graphic showing greater detail is available at https://ak-nsf-epscor.github.io/kenai-change/kenaiDevelChange.html .

For more information, please see the following journal article: Schoen et al. 2017. Fisheries. “Future of Pacific Salmon in the Face of Environmental Change: Lessons from One of the World’s Remaining Productive Salmon Regions.”

Supplemental Information:

We quantified the concentration of development in the Kenai River watershed using high-resolution aerial photography from the 1950s (US Geological Survey), 1980s (Alaska High Altitude Photography), and 2013 (Kenai Peninsula Borough), as well as the National Land Cover Database (NLCD 2013). We digitized human footprint polygons, categorized them as either low (house lots > 1 acre)-, medium (treed neighborhoods with moderate-sized lots)-, or high-intensity (commercially developed urban areas, multiple unit residences with few trees) development or cleared land using a modified Anderson level II classification (Anderson et al. 1976), and attributed the linear road features present in each time step.