Recurrent calls for integrated resource management urge that an understandi
ng of human activities and populations be incorporated into natural resourc
e research, management, and protection efforts. In this paper, we hypothesi
ze that watersheds can be a valuable geography for organizing an inquiry in
to the relationship between humans and the environment, and we present a fr
amework for conducting such efforts. The framework is grounded in the emerg
ing field of landscape ecology and incorporates demographic theory and data
. Demography has been advanced by technological capabilities associated wit
h the 1990 Census. Employing Geographic Information System (GIS) tools, we
couple Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) land cover data with census-derived hou
sing density data to demonstrate the operation of our framework and its uti
lity for better understanding human-landscape interactions. In our investig
ation of the Kickapoo Watershed and two sub-watersheds, located in southwes
tern Wisconsin, we identify relationships between landscape composition and
the distribution and social structure of human populations. Our findings o
ffer insight into the interplay between people and biophysical systems.