Mapping landscape intactness for BLM rapid ecoregional assessments

Background/Question/Methods

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has commissioned 13 rapid ecoregional assessments (REAs) to date with the objective being to assess the current status of identified conservation elements and predict the future condition of these elements and overall ecological health of the ecoregion based on existing spatial data. Future condition was assessed by focusing on the primary change agents operating on the landscape, including renewable energy development, invasive species, urban expansion, wildfire, and climate change. Developing a spatially explicit model to define current landscape condition that would also function in forecasting the future was an important component of the research. For two of the REAs (Colorado Plateau and Sonoran Desert), a spatial model based on current data and future projections was constructed relying on fuzzy logic as its foundation. Models were constructed to address terrestrial landscape intactness as well as aquatic intactness utilizing different data sources and logic integration.

Results/Conclusions

Results from the two models provided a scientifically defensible and repeatable process and map products that can be easily maintained in the regions for which they were built and, perhaps more importantly, transferrable to other regions facing similar issues with minimal effort. Terrestrial landscape and aquatic intactness results were successfully used to assess current status of numerous, identified conservation elements (including species, vegetation communities, special sites, and other values) and to a lesser degree future condition because of the lack of comparable spatial datasets for the near and long-term future time horizons. The models are robust and can be used in their original configuration, but they also easily customized to account for special ecological thresholds for specific conservation elements. All results are posted in Data Basin (www.databasin.org), an online data sharing and mapping system, for direct access and easy use by resource managers and others interested in regional conservation and natural resource management.