Integrated Landscape Monitoring — Great Basin Pilot

The Great Basin of the western United States is characterized by arid to semi-arid climate and covers much of Nevada, western Utah, southern Oregon and Idaho, and parts of eastern California (fig. 1). The Great Basin encompasses more than 100 million acres of public land, most of which is administered by agencies of the Department of Interior. The diverse ecosystems of the Great Basin are under constant stress from urbanization, surface- and ground-water development, consequences of wild-land fires, climate change and many other stresses that impact the composition, structure, and function of the landscape. An integrated scientific approach is essential to fully understand the impacts of various land-use changes and to evaluate adaptive management practices designed to maintain biological diversity embedded in the ecosystems of the Great Basin. The Great Basin Integrated Landscape Monitoring (GBILM) is a pilot project designed to 1) improve the understanding of land conditions and impacts of land use, 2) evaluate management actions, and 3) provide knowledge for informed decision making.

Objectives

Identify geospatial and tabular datasets currently available for a subarea within the Great Basin. The datasets will be selected and compiled to provide a snapshot of current landscape conditions as a baseline for evaluation of landscape change. For the pilot study, datasets will be limited to White Pine County in east-central Nevada. Compiling and synthesizing geospatial datasets for a subarea of the Great Basin will facilitate the identification of those datasets currently available that can be used to test the conceptual framework and address the overall GBILM project objectives in a smaller area prior to application to the entire study area.

Strategy and Approach

Hydrologic, biologic, geologic and geographic perspectives will be integrated to yield one conceptual model per pilot that depicts key factors of landscape change and their effects on the hydrology, biology, and geography of the landscape together with the identification of how potential management strategies may influence these effects. Teams will identify existing data and monitoring (as well as gaps) needed to measure and evaluate the model and the priority management strategies. Indicators of change should be selected based on their sensitivity to change, cost, and their appropriateness in meeting management needs.

A monitoring strategy will be developed to measure, evaluate, and assess the key indicators of landscape change. The monitoring strategy will include questions addressed, sampling design (based on required sensitivity), methodology, anticipated analysis/analytic tools, data management, reporting strategy, and review schedule. Various mechanisms will be employed (workshops, etc.) to compare and contrast the models and strategies developed by each pilot team with the intent that a conceptual model and monitoring strategy applicable across pilots (landscapes) could be developed.

Additional Project Information

Additional information is available from the Geography Discipline ILM website.

Relevance and Benefits

The Great Basin includes over 86 million acres of public land in 5 western states (CA, ID, NV, OR, UT). The majority of these public lands are managed by DOI agencies, primarily the nearly 70 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Agencies have substantial needs to identify and, where possible, manage system drivers and stressors. The Great Basin is a vast mosaic of diverse shrublands, grasslands, and montane forests incised with rare but critical riparian corridors and aquatic resources. The ecoregion is the most diverse in the number of endemic native plants and animals. The region is also experiencing quickly growing human populations and associated expanding urban fronts. Other land uses, notably agriculture and ranching, rely on large proportions of the landscape. Furthermore, the ecoregion is impacted by the synergistic effects of stand replacing wildfire and annual grass invasion leading to large-scale removal of native land cover. The temporal and spatial effects of this disturbance appears to be increasing with time but, because this change is poorly documented, an effective monitoring strategy is a critical need. At the coarse scale, there are strong linkages between the issues in the Great Basin and the Columbia Plateau Focus Areas. Therefore, these results have relevance to regions neighboring the Great Basin.