Remote‐sensing Based Assessment of Long‐term Riparian Vegetation Health in Proximity to Agricultural Lands with Herbicide Use History

Riparian ecosystems provide various ecosystem services including habitat for a variety of plant and animal communities, biofiltering, and stabilizing stream and river systems. Due to their location, riparian zones often share long borders with agricultural fields where herbicides are commonly applied to eliminate unwanted plants. There is a general concern that exposure of riparian vegetation to off‐target drifted herbicides may adversely impact their health and diversity. We utilized the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to investigate the long‐term (between 1992 and 2011) trend of riparian vegetation health at 17 locations in the Midwest and Great Plains areas of the United States, where herbicide usage was likely most intense. Assessment of NDVI data demonstrated that long‐term vegetation health did not decline for the studied riparian zones located in proximity to croplands during spring months (April and May). During summer (June and July), while the long‐term vegetation health did not decline for the majority of the sites, there were a few cases in Kansas and Nebraska with a decline in vegetation health (negative‐trending NDVI). Cluster analysis of the negative‐trending NDVI pixels showed that the majority of these pixels were randomly distributed throughout these riparian sites, indicating a lack of shared common causing factors. Similarly, proximity analysis suggested that distance from croplands was not associated with the decline of vegetation health found in these sites, suggesting that exposure to herbicide drift may not be a plausible factor because this would have shown higher impact on pixels closer to the cropland. Changes in canopy coverage and vegetation diversity also did not show any dependence on distance from croplands. Finally, the remote‐sensing–based NDVI data sets used provide only an indirect way of assessing the impact of herbicide drift, and therefore, further work based on field survey data is recommended to completely isolate the impacts of herbicides. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2019;15:528–543. © 2019 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC)