Rangeland Monitoring and Forecast Modeling from the Ground Up

EarthzineDEVELOP Summer 2014 VPS, DEVELOP Virtual Poster Session, Original

Project Team: Great Basin Climate Team
Team Location: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California

Precipitation, temperature, aspect, slope, and elevation are examples of NASA data used in the Great Basin climate analysis. Image Credit: Great Basin Climate Team.

Precipitation, temperature, aspect, slope, and elevation are examples of NASA data used in the Great Basin climate analysis. Image Credit: Great Basin Climate Team.

Authors:
Jeffry Ely, Project Lead (Old Dominion University)
Esther Essoudry (University of San Francisco)
Katie Wilson (Idaho State University)
Neeshi Patadia (University of Southern California)
Brittany Zajic (University of California, Los Angeles)

Mentors/Advisors:
Cynthia Schmidt (Bay Area Environmental Research Institute)
Juan Torres-P̩rez (Bay Area Environmental Research Institute)

Past/Other Contributors:
Matthew Bobo (Bureau of Land Management)
Mark Cocoa (Bureau of Land Management)
Lynn Fenstermaker (Desert Research Institute)
Todd Hopkins (Great Basin Landscape Conservation Cooperative)
Alison Meadow (University of Arizona)
Christine Albano (University of California, Davis)
Erica Fleishman (University of California, Davis)

Abstract:
The Great Basin ecoregion in the western United States represents one of the last large expanses of wild lands in the nation and is currently facing significant challenges due to human impacts, drought, the encroachment of invasive species such as cheatgrass, and climate change. Rangelands in the Great Basin are of important ecological and economic significance for the United States; however, 40 percent of public rangelands fail to meet required health standards set by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). This project provided a set of assessment tools for researchers and land managers that integrate remotely-sensed and in-situ datasets to quantify and mitigate threats to public lands in the Great Basin ecoregion. The study area, which accounts for 20 percent of the total Great Basin ecoregion, was analyzed using 30 meter data from Landsat 8. Present conditions were evaluated from vegetation indices, landscape features, hydrological processes, and atmospheric conditions derived from the remotely-sensed data and validated with available in-situ ground survey data, provided by the BLM. Rangeland health metrics were developed and landscape change drivers were identified. Subsequently, projected climate conditions derived from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) were used to forecast the impact of changing climatic conditions within the study area according to the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 projections. These forecasted conditions were used in the Maximum Entropy Model (MaxEnt) to predict areas at risk for rangeland degradation on 30-year intervals for 2040, 2070, and 2100. Finally, vegetation health risk maps were provided to the project partners to aid in future land management decisions in the Great Basin ecoregion. These tools provide a low-cost solution to assess landscape conditions, provide partners with a metric to identify potential problematic areas, and mitigate serious threats to the ecosystems.

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