The Landscape Toolbox

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”