Landscape Analysis
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One of the greatest challenges facing landscape conservation is how to ensure ecosystem-wide conservation goals, such as those articulated in Landscape Conservation Designs, can effectively inform local management plans and actions. Developing feasible conservation goals and useful landscape planning products requires participation by local stakeholders. However, opportunities for these stakeholders to engage in planning processes are often limited. This webinar will examine the role of local stakeholders and human dimensions thinking in transboundary resource conservation. Catherine Doyle-Capitman, Doctoral Candidate at Cornell University, will highlight the role of local stakeholders in bridging the gap between conservation planning and management implementation. She will then present best practice guidance for engaging local stakeholders and integrating social data into landscape conservation decision processes.
The Nature Conservancy used soils data and satellite imagery to map plant communities to a one-meter resolution. They determined that 268 acres in Great Basin National Park is a basin wildrye ecosystem. This ecosystem was identified as the most endangered plant community in the Park through a park-wide watershed analysis and conservation planning assessment process.
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Our results demonstrated that the important predictors from Lidar-derived metrics had a strong correlation with field-measured biomass in the Random Forests (RF) regression models. The Stepwise Multiple Regression (SMR) results were similar but slightly better than RF. Overall, both RF and SMR methods explained more than 74% of the variance in biomass, with the most important Lidar variables being associated with vegetation structure and statistical measures of this structure (e.g., standard deviation of height was a strong predictor of biomass). Using our model results, we developed spatially-explicit Lidar estimates of total and shrub biomass across our study site in the Great Basin, U.S.A., for monitoring and planning in this imperiled ecosystem.
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Models explained much of the variability between predictions and manual measurements, and yet it is expected that future applications could produce even better results by reducing some of the methodological sources of error that we encountered. Our work demonstrates how terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be used efficiently to extend manual measurement of vegetation characteristics from small to large plots in grasslands and shrublands, with potential application to other similarly structured ecosystems. Our method shows that vegetation structural characteristics can be modeled without classifying and delineating individual plants, a challenging and time-consuming step common in previous methods applying TLS to vegetation inventory. Improving application of TLS to studies of shrub-steppe ecosystems will serve immediate management needs by enhancing vegetation inventories, environmental modeling studies, and the ability to train broader datasets collected from air and space.
Many inventory and assessment projects spanning large landscapes, the entire Great Basin, or the western US, have been completed recently or are underway for key natural resources. This special session of the 4th Great Basin Consortium Conference brought together leaders of these efforts to compare/contrast their efforts and create a synthesis product or “table of contents” for geospatial data users.
Geospatial presentations in pdf format are provided below:
- Landscape conservation management and analysis portal, Sean Finn USFS, GNLCC
- Rapid ecological assessment of the Northern and Central Basin and Range, Nika Lepak, BLM
- Fire and Invasives Tool, Mike Pellant, BLM
- Land Treatment Digital Library, David Pilliod, USGS
- Conservation Efforts Database, Justin Welty, USGS
- Landscape Toolbox and JournalMap, Bob Unnasch, TNC
- Remote sensing characterization of GB shrub and grasslands for monitoring, Collin Homer
- BLM Riparian Toolbar, Ken McGwire, DRI
- Geospatial weather sources, Stuart Hardegree, ARS
- Development and use of seed zones in native plant restoration, Francis Kilkenny, RMRS
- NorWEST Stream Temperature, Dan Isaak, RMRS
- Forest Inventory and Analysis, Chris Witt, FS
- Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring Strategy, Nika Lepak, BLM
- Sagebrush ecosystem response to changing climate and disturbance: an ecohydrological perspective, John Bradford, USGS
- Small mammal thermal mapping, Erik Beever, USGS
In this webinar, April Hulet, Brigham Young University, discusses recent findings from her and Dr. Bruce Roundy’s latest research regarding digital imagery and land cover classifications for assessing rangeland health and fuel loads in Great Basin pinyon and juniper woodlands.
In this webinar, David Pilliod, Research Ecologist, USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, presents an overview of the Land Treatment Digital Library (LTDL), which catalogs legacy land treatment information on BLM lands in the western US. The LTDL can be used by managers and scientists for: compiling information for data-calls, producing maps, generating reports, an conducting analyses at varying spatial and temporal scales.
In this webinar, Jerry Tagestad, Sr. Research Scientist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, presents an overview of tools to aid rangeland managers in deriving information from the abundant geospatial data available today. Particular emphasis was placed on a recently developed pre-season fire risk model that could be adapted for the Great Basin.
Workshop recordings.
Workshop series presented in Orlando, Florida at the SRM Annual Technical Conference were streamed live and recorded for archived use.
2/10/14 – Workshop 1: ESD Uses and Users, provides examples of ESD uses in diverse ecosystems throughout the United States. This workshop is a showcase of the increasing development and use of ESDs for all land types.
2/11/14 – Workshop 2: Unifying Concepts for Riparian Ecological Sites, focuses on advancing ESD concepts for riparian ecosystems, which differ from upland systems in the degree to which hydrology drives ecosystem dynamics. This riparian ESD workshop is part of a larger effort to advance the conceptual framework of ESDs in riparian systems, and will present the current state of RCESD concepts and provide opportunities for input from a broad audience.
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ModelMap software, created by specialists working for the Rocky Mountain Research Station, automates and simplifies the map modeling process, allowing researchers and land managers to visualize complicated geospatial data, develop predictions, and communicate it all to stakeholders and other researchers.