| Abstract |
- The Integrated Landscape Assessment Project (ILAP) was a multi-year effort to produce information, maps, and models to help land managers, policy-makers, and others conduct mid- to broad-scale (e.g., watersheds to states and larger areas) prioritization of land management actions, perform landscape assessments, and estimate cumulative effects of management actions for planning and other purposes. ILAP provided complete cross-ownership geospatial data and maps on current vegetation, potential vegetation, land ownership and management allocation classes, and other landscape attributes across Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. State-and-transition models (STMs) were developed to cover all major upland vegetation types in the four states. These models incorporate vegetation succession, management actions, and natural disturbances to allow users to examine the mid- and long-term effects of alternative management and disturbance scenarios. New STM linkages to wildlife habitat, fuel treatment and community economics, above ground carbon pools, biomass, and wildfire hazard were developed and integrated at landscape scales. Climatized STMs were developed for focus areas in Oregon and Arizona to examine potential effects of climate change on potential future vegetation conditions.
The Pacific Northwest Research Station in conjunction with Oregon State University spent several years and considerable effort developing and supporting the Interagency Mapping and Assessment Project (IMAP), an interagency collaborative effort to transfer landscape assessment tools to land managers and others. As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, this 10-year IMAP collaborative effort was expanded to create the Integrated Landscape Assessment Project (ILAP) which was charged to identify and analyze areas within the states of Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, and Arizona that could inform economically viable fuel reduction and restoration activities.
Over the course of the past three years, ILAP has produced consistent, integrated vegetation data sets and models for millions of acres across the American Northwest and Southwest, allowing decision makers to explore possible changes in landscape conditions under different management scenarios across all lands. ILAP’s all-lands focus makes it particularly applicable, given that the complexity of natural resource management has grown well beyond ownership boundaries. ILAP has become known as an innovative tool for informing management decisions across all major upland vegetation systems at a watershed scale. Through user-friendly maps, graphs, and tables, ILAP creates a decision support framework for comparing different management scenarios. This kind of “what if” exercise provides a unique opportunity to understand the interactions among biophysical, social, and economic factors that determine the dynamic of a landscape.
- Keywords: climate, conservation, restoration, landscapes, wildlife, wildfire, data, rural
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