Landscape Analysis
Description: Webinar discusses discuss FIRE-BIRD, an ArcGIS spatial tool for applying habitat suitability models for woodpecker species of concern to generate maps that inform forest management planning. FIRE-BIRD was developed to help managers make the best decisions for maintaining habitat of key wildlife species, while still allowing economic benefits to local communities. Habitat suitability models can inform forest management for wildlife species of conservation concern. Models quantify relationships between known species locations and environmental attributes, which are used to identify areas most likely to support species of concern. Managers can then limit negative human impacts in areas of high suitability or conduct habitat improvements in areas of marginal suitability. RMRS researchers developed FIRE-BIRD, an ArcGIS toolbox, to map habitat suitability for woodpeckers of conservation concern to help inform locations for management activities in predominantly dry coniferous forests of the Inland Northwest and Northern Sierras..
Presenters: Vicki Saab and Todd Cross, RMRS researchers
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The United States Forest Service 2012 Planning Rule prioritizes making lands resilient to climate change. Although researchers have investigated the history of “resilience” and its multiple interpretations, few have examined perceptions or experiences of resource staff tasked with implementing resilience. This study interviewed Forest Service staff in the Southwestern Region to evaluate how managers and planners interpret resilience as an agency strategy, execution of resilience in management, and climate change’s impact on perception of resilience. Interviewees identified resilience as a main driver of agency response to land management but, when applying the concept, experienced barriers including ambiguity; scale; management specificity versus broad, adaptive landscape approach; and lack of metrics or examples. Interviewees found restoring ecosystem function to promote resilience while planning for future changed landscapes difficult. They desired landscape-scale collaboration to understand how to operationalize the resilience directive. Our findings revealed obstacles and opportunities for resilience in a managerial context.
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Screening is a strategy for detecting undesirable change prior to manifestation of symptoms or adverse effects. Although the well-recognized utility of screening makes it commonplace in medicine, it has yet to be implemented in ecosystem management. Ecosystem management is in an era of diagnosis and treatment of undesirable change, and as a result, remains more reactive than proactive and unable to effectively deal with today’s plethora of non-stationary conditions. In this paper, we introduce spatial imaging-based screening to ecology. We link advancements in spatial resilience theory, data, and technological and computational capabilities and power to detect regime shifts (i.e., vegetation state transitions) that are known to be detrimental to human well-being and ecosystem service delivery. With a state-of-the-art landcover dataset and freely available, cloud-based, geospatial computing platform, we screen for spatial signals of the three most iconic vegetation transitions studied in western USA rangelands: (1) erosion and desertification; (2) woody encroachment; and (3) annual exotic grass invasion. For a series of locations that differ in ecological complexity and geographic extent, we answer the following questions: (1) Which regime shift is expected or of greatest concern? (2) Can we detect a signal associated with the expected regime shift? (3) If detected, is the signal transient or persistent over time? (4) If detected and persistent, is the transition signal stationary or non-stationary over time? (5) What other signals do we detect? Our approach reveals a powerful and flexible methodology, whereby professionals can use spatial imaging to verify the occurrence of alternative vegetation regimes, image the spatial boundaries separating regimes, track the magnitude and direction of regime shift signals, differentiate persistent and stationary transition signals that warrant continued screening from more concerning persistent and non-stationary transition signals, and leverage disciplinary strength and resources for more targeted diagnostic testing (e.g., inventory and monitoring) and treatment (e.g., management) of regime shifts. While the rapid screening approach used here can continue to be implemented and refined for rangelands, it has broader implications and can be adapted to other ecological systems to revolutionize the information space needed to better manage critical transitions in nature.
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It is sometimes assumed the sparse and low statured vegetation in arid systems would limit the effectiveness of two remote-sensing derived indices of burn severity: the difference Normalised Burn Ratio (dNBR) and relativised difference Normalised Burn Ratio (RdNBR). We compared the relationship that dNBR, RdNBR and a ground-based index of burn severity (the Composite Burn Index, CBI) had with woody cover and woody density 1 year after burning in five fires that occurred in the Mojave Desert during 2005. Statistically, dNBR and RdNBR were both effective measures of severity in all three elevation zones; woody cover and density had steep exponential declines as the values of each remote-sensing index increased. We found though that dNBR was more ecologically interpretable than RdNBR and will likely be of most relevance in the Mojave Desert.
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This study presents a novel risk-science approach that aligns wildfire response decisions, mitigation opportunities, and land management objectives by consciously integrating social, ecological and fire management system needs. We use fire-prone landscapes of the US Pacific Northwest as our study area, and report on and describe how three complementary risk-based analytic tools—quantitative wildfire risk assessment, mapping of suppression difficulty, and atlases of potential control locations—can form the foundation for adaptive governance in fire management. Together, these tools integrate wildfire risk with fire management difficulties and opportunities, providing a more complete picture of the wildfire risk management challenge. Leveraging recent and ongoing experience integrating local experiential knowledge with these tools, we provide examples and discuss how these geospatial datasets create a risk-based planning structure that spans multiple spatial scales and uses.
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Recent debate over the efficiency of flood irrigation and resulting transition to other “more efficient” types of irrigation has put many of the working wet meadows sustained by flood irrigation at risk. As the sustainability of these landscapes is primarily dependent on ranchers’ management decisions, we sought to gain a deeper understanding of factors influencing ranchers who flood irrigate and how these factors interrelate.
This study identified 16 plant communities based on plant cover from the Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring Strategy data from the BLM (5,200 plots). We found that abundance of lichens and mosses varies among communities, but that both components of biocrusts are present in all plant communities. Biocrusts are indicators of two of these communities: one that is defined by high cover of mosses and basin big sagebrush and one that is defined by high cover of lichens and shadscale saltbush. Using non-parametric multiplicative regression, we evaluated a suite of abiotic and disturbance variables to assess the degree to which climate and soils are associated with the abundance of lichens and mosses at the regional scale. At the regional scale, soil depth and maximum vapor pressure deficit were found to be strongly associated with the abundance of lichens and January minimum temperature dictated the abundance of mosses. At the scale of plant communities, community specific metrics of soils and climate were better able to explain the abundance of biocrusts. Our demonstration of the presence of biocrusts across the western US suggests that studies on ecosystem function could include these organisms because they are present in all plant communities, maintain arguably stronger associations with climatic variation, are directly associated with soils, and contribute to ecosystem functions that are not solely maintained by vascular plants.
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This example features a training program that has extended beyond one student and classroom to involve a team of learners and multiple classrooms.
This webinar focuses on LANDFIRE Remap products in LF’s Southwest GeoArea: Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, and sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and California. Presenters Jim Smith and Kori Blankenship of The Nature Conservancy’s LF team review improvements to LF’s newest product offerings and also look at what remains the same as in previous versions. The Southwest is the second of nine Remap regional product releases that are scheduled through mid-2020.
The webinar informs participants about the new LANDFIRE Remap products, what has changed from previous product offerings, and what remains the same or has been updated. It offers application examples taken from the SW region, and will save time to answer questions and listen to comments at the webinar’s conclusion. The presentation is directed those who are or might be considering using LANDFIRE products to inform fire and vegetation management decisions, e.g. researchers, land and project managers, fire and fuel professionals, GIS specialists, scientists, and students.
Kori Blankenship, Fire Ecologist and Jim Smith, Program Lead, of The Nature Conservancy’s LANDFIRE Team, present.