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Examining the Impact of Urban Growth on Irrigation Ditch Use

The following project utilizes GIS analysis techniques to show the impact of urban growth on irrigated agricultural lands in a Northern Colorado watershed. The following materials visually document the relationship between the urban sprawl of the Fort Collins metropolitan area and land use around a network of irrigation ditches in the Cache la Poudre watershed.

The analytical techniques used in this project are relatively simple and easy to transfer to a variety of projects. This project relies on the clip tool to show how irrigation ditches have been incorporated into the city limits of Fort Collins. In addition to clipping canal lengths to the city boundaries, we used data from the attribute tables to make analytic claims about changes in land use around irrigation ditches. This shows that land use changes can be assessed without complex land use data. Though land use data is available for the Fort Collins area, it does not tell the whole story of land use changes over the past 150 years. We feel that the GIS processes utilized in this project are best used to assess historical changes of land use, particularly for historical where land use data is not readily available or in parts of the world that do not keep geographic records of land use.

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