Existing Vegetation

Existing Vegetation

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Purpose:

Information on current vegetation and land use is fundamental in natural resource planning and management. Understanding the composition and location of forest types, as well as openlands and non-forested areas, is needed to assess many management options and considerations. Recreational opportunities, wildlife habitat and forest management capability, and other issues can only be addressed given accurate information on current vegetation.

There are several sources of information on current vegetation in the Great Lakes region, and spatial information covering extensive areas has recently become available with the advent of satellite imagery. The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) satellite imagery, with a 1 kilometer resolution, is the only information source that presently covers all of the Lake States. This classification of land cover is very coarse, and inaccurate in some locations, so its use is limited. Classifications of newer imagery from the LANDSAT Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite, which has a 30-meter resolution, are becoming available through cooperative efforts between the USGS's Biological Resource Division and the state Departments of Natural Resources. National and State Forests, Tribal Nations, and many industrial interests have maps of their properties developed by on-the-ground inventories. The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the USDA-Forest Service has nonspatial (plot-level) data on forest conditions and trends including composition, growth, mortality, and removals. Different data sources thus provide different types of information on the forestlands of the Lake States, and while FIA is the most statistically valid, other sources must be used for examining spatially explicit conditions such as landscape patterns.

Scientists and managers can use satellite-derived information for a number of purposes such as evaluating commonness and rarity of forest communities, and the availability of different forest types for conservation or forest production goals. Spatial distributions of forest species and species groups may also be evaluated in terms of the arrangement and size of various patches, yielding indices and other measurements of landscape structure. These measures are useful as coarse-filter indicators of ecosystem function, and are particularly useful when related to specific organisms and ecological processes (Gustafson 1998). Patch analyses enable managers to identify areas where patterns of forested and openland patches could be maintained or modified to increase overall benefits. Examples of these benefits include integrated resource management for wildlife, recreation, wildfire suppression, commodity production, and biodiversity conservation.

Our goal is to compile the different information sources, compare them, analyze conditions and trends and landscape patterns for different ecological units and ownerships, and provide results and summaries. This work will be ongoing as information and analysis results become available

LITERATURE CITED

Gustafson, Eric. 1998. Quantifying Landscape Spatial Pattern: What Is the State of the Art? Ecosystems 1. Springer-Verlag. p143-156: .

Analysis Team:

USDA Forest Service--Southern Research Station, Rhinelander, WI
David Cleland, Ecologist

USDA Forest Service--North Central Research Station, Houghton, MI
Maureen Mislivets, Landscape Ecologist

Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI
Sari Saunders, Landscape Ecologist

Natural Resources Research Institute, Duluth, MN
George Host, Forest Ecologist

USDA Forest Service--Chippewa National Forest, Cass Lake, MN
David Shadis, Soil Scientist

USDA Forest Service--North Central Research Station, Rhinelander, WI
Jim Jordan, Forest Ecologist

Available GIS Maps