Demography and Environment in Grassland Settlement

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will study the relationship between population and environment in a grassland region during its settlement and conversion from native grasses to staple grain cultivation and rangeland. The goal of this research is to understand the demographic and environmental consequences of what was a geometrically uniform and rapid shift in land use. This subject remains a vital question, one that is poorly understood given its importance for the long-term resilience of grassland environments. A sample of farms and families in twenty-five townships across the state of Kansas embraces key variations in plains ecology, and allows a study of landscape transformations over the 75-year period from 1865 to 1940. Kansas has rich documentation of both agricultural land use practices and population with which to investigate this transformation. The research will show the ways that human population shaped the landscape, and the ways that environment shaped people, at the level of the individual farm and family. It tests a hypothesis that asserts the cumulative impacts of household-level processes on landscape-level dynamics were iterative and possibly recursive: humans and their demographic priorities altered landscapes; land-use choices changed in response to monitoring of ecological processes, and altered landscapes engendered further cycles of change. Four basic questions motivate analysis in which both demographic and environmental outcomes are the subjects of study: a) how did demographic processes affect land use and land use affect household organization and population movement, b) what are the spatial and temporal dimensions of "monoculture," c) how did conversion to cropland alter pre-settlement grasslands, and d) what were the most stable and persistent forms of environmental and demographic interaction?