The Landscape Toolbox

Starting this spring, we will be hosting a series of online training sessions on tools and products associated with the Landscape Toolbox project. These hour-long web seminars are available free of charge thanks to funding from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. The 2010 web seminars will focus on tools and techniques for assessment and monitoring of large shrubland, grassland, and savanah landscapes. A PDF flyer for the seminar series is available here.

• April 27 - The Rangeland Assessment and Monitoring Methods Guide
• May 4 - Using the Database for Inventory, Monitoring and Assessment
• June 8 - Assessment and Monitoring Techniques for Evaluating Road Impacts
• July 20 - Practical Tools for Multi-Scale Sample Design and Selection

All seminars will take place at 2:00pm (MDT), and recordings of the seminars will be available here following each one. Each web seminar is elgible for one continuing education unit (CEU) from the Society for Range Management. Registration for the web seminars is required and can be done online at http://www.landscapetoolbox.org/train/register.

In continuing with the integration of the Landscape Toolbox project with the work going on at the USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range, we are pleased to announce the release of the newest version of the Rangeland Database and Field Entry System - Version 1.5.

The Rangeland Database and Field Data Entry System was developed by the USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range to increase the speed and precision of data entry in both the field and office and organize and store field data. Developed in Microsoft Access to be easy to use, fast, and flexible, the Rangeland Database supports data entry and storage for 16 different quantitative and qualitative assessment and monitoring methods.

You can find more information on the new version of the Rangeland Database in the Assessment and Monitoring pageof the Landscape Toolbox .

Over the next year, we will be working to more fully integrate the Rangeland Database with other existing Landscape Toolbox tools as well as those in development. We'll have more information on this process soon.

Cheers-

Jason Karl, Ph.D.
Landscape Toolbox Project Lead
USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range

From the outset of the Landscape Toolbox project, one of our core principles has been that the Landscape Toolbox should be built upon a foundation of peer-reviewed science. While we've certainly made a lot of headway building on the work of others, we have also generated quite a bit of interesting research ourselves as part of the Toolbox project.

I'm quite excited to announce that the first scientific paper to come from the Landscape Toolbox was published today in the journal Landscape Ecology. You can find the paper at SpringerLink. If you'd like a PDF of the paper, email me.

This paper deals with how information in remotely-sensed imagery changes as scale becomes coarser - one of the fundamental concepts in the Toolbox's multi-scale framework. We looked at how the relationship between field and image data changed as the data were scaled up, and we compared the typical approach of scaling by aggregating pixels into larger squares to the new object-based approach that we have adopted for the Toolbox. Our results clearly demonstrated that not only did the object-based approach give higher correlations between the field data and imagery, but that the correlations were consistent across scales. Pixel-based methods produced unpredictable relationships between the field data and imagery.

This paper is a great validation of several key aspects of the Landscape Toolbox project. It's also just the first of many papers to be published. Two more papers are in different stages of publication - one in press with Rangeland Ecology and Management, and one in review for Ecological Informatics. Two additional manuscripts are in preparation, and several more are on the drawing board.

I'll make sure and let you know as additional publications come out.

Cheers-

Jason Karl, Ph.D.
Landscape Toolbox Project Lead
USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range

It's been a while since we've posted anything to the Landscape Toolbox blog, but don't take our lack of postings as an indication that we've not been doing anything. We've been hard at work developing a suite of tools for the Landscape Toolbox. In this blog posting, I'd like to highlight one of them: the Rangeland Assessment and Monitoring Methods Guide (Methods Guide for short). Check it out at http://www.rangelandmethods.org.

The Methods Guide is a web-based tool and resource designed to give researchers and managers the information necessary to make informed decisions about which field and remote-sensing method or combination of methods could be most useful and cost effective for their specific rangeland management needs. The Methods Guide provides reviews on how well each method performs to answer specific questions as well as descriptions, relative costs, references to rangeland applications, and contact information for the different techniques. The techniques are rated through expert and user reviews. The Methods Guide is intended to be the users’ first step to selecting assessment and monitoring protocols by providing enough information on strengths, limitations, and rangeland applications that users can seek additional, more specific how-to information on the recommended techniques.

There are two interrelated parts to the Methods Guide, a discovery tool that starts with a user's management question or objective and provides recommended field and remote sensing methods based on expert ratings of the methods for different applications. The second part (which can either be accessed directly through the Method Guide homepage or through the discovery tool results) is a wiki devoted to explaining and providing rangeland applications of each of the methods in the Methods Guide. The wiki has a great Frequently Asked Questions page that explains the Methods Guide in detail and how it works.

The Methods Guide is very much a collaborative effort, relying on contributions from experienced professionals of information about and reviews of the many rangeland assessment and monitoring methods. The abstracts in this wiki have been created by rangeland science and management professionals who have generously volunteered their time and expertise. We need your help to make the Methods Guide as complete and useful as possible. There are lots of ways that you can get involved:

If you're interested in helping out with the Methods Guide or just want to give us some feedback, please drop me a line at jkarl@nmsu.edu.

Cheers-

Jason Karl, Ph.D.
Landscape Toolbox Project Lead
USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range
575-646-7015

For this first posting to the new Landscape Toolbox Project blog, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the Landscape Toolbox Project website at www.landscapetoolbox.org. The Landscape Toolbox is a project of the Idaho Chapter of The Nature Conservancy with the goal of improving conservation and effective management of rangeland ecosystems by bringing together existing, proven tools for assessing and monitoring rangeland landscapes and planning for rangeland management. The LandscapeToolbox.org website is the information hub for this project and an access point for the project’s tools and data products.

Some brief background serves as a good introduction to what the Landscape Toolbox project is all about. In the course of working with public and private rangeland managers and carrying out stewardship of our preserves in Idaho, we realized that the detailed and defensible information that’s necessary to manage and monitor rangeland ecosystems isn’t widely available at the scales at which management happens. We were well aware of (and in some cases helped develop) methods and technologies to gather and analyze good rangeland data. These included not only field-based methods, but also ways of measuring attributes of rangelands via satellite and aerial images. However many of these tools weren’t being used effectively in routine rangeland management. Some of the biggest reasons for this were that it often wasn’t clear how different methods can be used together to answer a management question or which methods were appropriate for the kind and scale of question that is being asked. Through the Landscape Toolbox project we are addressing these problems and developing a framework that helps identify the right scales and integrate the appropriate methods to answer rangeland management questions. We are developing the Landscape Toolbox through case studies in the Snake and Columbia River Basin region of the Northwest U.S., but we believe that much of what we’re doing can be applicable to other rangeland systems.

Please take a few minutes and browse through the LandscapeToolbox.org website where you’ll find much more information on the background of the project, the tools we’re developing, and who we’re partnering with. You’ll notice that while there is a lot of information describing the tools that we’re bringing together, there are also many “coming soon” placeholders for tools and case-study documents that aren’t ready yet. We’re working hard to make these tools available as soon as possible, but we wanted to make information about the project and the tools we’ve already developed available now.

In the coming weeks we’ll be making regular postings to this blog to tell you about the different tools that we’re developing and where they’re being used. In the meantime, feel free to contact us with any questions or comments that you have. You’ll find contact information here.

The Landscape Toolbox Team”