Best Practices for Mission Applications

Automating a USFS Ecological Planning & Decision Support Process Using ModelBuilder

—Michael Grieco, Allpoints GIS

Ecological assessment is gaining increased importance in strategic planning, resource management, analyses, and decision making on federal lands. Recognizing the strategic value of such assessments, the Rocky Mountain Region of the US Forest Service developed a detailed ecological assessment process emphasizing watershed characterization and ecological sustainability while considering anthropogenic activities. This paper summarizes the Region's methodologies, the ModelBuilder tools, and the resulting automated workflow designed to ensure a repeatable, defensible, and transferable process.

The models automate the analysis of the ecological drivers and conditions that characterize the physical environment, and then systematize the running of various scenarios evaluating anthropogenic change agents at the watershed level. The automated GIS workflow includes a data management process using prescribed file structures and a geodatabase to track and manage 1000's of run variables, run metadata, interim, and final results. The models enable historic and forward-looking analyses while also identifying effects between and across watersheds.