About the Landscape Toolbox
The Idaho Chapter of The Nature Conservancy is working with both public and private land management partners to develop a set of analytical and monitoring tools, the Landscape Toolbox, which are designed to enable better rangeland management at landscape scales by integrating existing and emerging field, remote sensing, and landscape scenario modeling methods for rangeland assessment, monitoring, and planning.
Background
Protecting or improving rangeland condition requires comprehensive landscape management strategies. Land managers have embraced a landscape-scale philosophy and new methods are being developed to provide information to planners and managers such as satellite imagery to assess current conditions and detect changes, and predictive models to forecast change. Unfortunately, there is currently no coordinated system for integrating these new approaches with existing management methods.
A key strength of the Landscape Toolbox is its ability to integrate information gathered at multiple scales, ranging from site specific ground-based surveys to large-scale remote sensing methods. By merging these different types of data into a single analytical framework, the toolbox provides an objective, measureable, repeatable, and efficient system that managers can use to analyze sagebrush ecosystems.
Project Objectives
At its foundation, the Landscape Toolbox has two basic premises. First, most management questions can be asked at more than one scale (see below), and second, any method or technology has a range of scales over which it can provide meaningful information to answer management questions. Thus the best results will come from matching management questions to a mix of technologies and methods based on the scale of the question. The goal of the Landscape Toolbox project is to show how, by organizing management questions and information by scale using the Landscape Toolbox Products described below, different methods and technologies can be used together to answer questions at different scales.
Landscape Toolbox Products
The three components of the Toolbox are built around an evolving and expanding library of management questions from rangeland managers covering topics ranging from juniper management, to grazing, to sage grouse habitat conservation.
These tools will help inform mangers and the public on the condition of landscapes and the potential for success (and economic feasibility) of various strategies, such as sagebrush restoration. Each of these components addresses needs that managers have for collecting, analyzing, and communicating information for planning and decision-making. The three Toolbox components are Multi-Scale Landscape Assessment, Cumulative Landscape Analysis and Restoration Planning, and Landscape Visualization.
Multi-Scale Landscape Assessment
The multi-scale landscape assessment component will help managers match field and remote-sensing methods and technologies to scale-specific management questions, provide guidance on using the information, and determine ecologically-relevant scale from remotely-sensed imagery.
Tools offered as part of this component include:
- Software tools based on object-based image analysis for detecting and extracting scales from field and image data and designing field sampling schemes.
- A Rangeland Assessment and Monitoring Methods Guide with associated abstracts that evaluates methods and shows what tools and technologies could be useful for answering specific management questions.
- A Data Center internet mapping site where commonly-used, frequently-updated layers are organized by scale and can be used via a browser or downloaded into a GIS.
Cumulative Landscape Analysis and Restoration Planning
The cumulative landscape analysis and restoration planning component will help uses investigate how dynamic landscapes may change over time under different management and disturbance scenarios.
Tools offered as part of this component include:
- A library of ecological-site-based state-and-transition models for rangelands to be used in prediction tools.
- Software, built on ESSA Technologies’ VDDT/TELSA system, for using the library model to predict how rangeland landscapes may change over time.
- Functions for adaptive management and planning: evaluating different management scenarios, estimating variables, quantifying uncertainty, and monitoring results of predictions.
Landscape Visualization
The Landscape Visualization component provides three-dimensional visualization software to transform the arcane language of planning and management into an immediately understandable picture of landscapes and their potential future.
Tools offered as part of this component include:
- A simplified interface for creating 3D visualizations of rangeland data or plans.
- Functions to export views from the Data Center mapping web site or visualizations created on a desktop GIS to Google Earth.
- A library of 3D symbols for common rangeland plants for use in creating visualizations.