Abstract

NPS uses GPS to assist GIS Applications and Vegetation Inventories
Track: Federal Systems Implementation
Author(s): Karl Brown

The National Park Service has a nationwide Inventory and Monitoring program to support protected area management. A subset of 270 parks with natural resources are under the I&M program, and twelve basic inventories sample the Base Cartographic,

Soils, Geology, Vegetation, Bibliographies, Species lists, Air quality,
and Water quality of these public lands. GPS provides a valuable utility for these inventories, and this session will cover the vegetation inventory efforts that utilize GPS and the national utility of NDGPS, real time differential positioning.

Several major needs of NPS efforts include: Point positioning for vegetation mapping, navigation requirements for accuracy assessment (AA) sampling for polygon verification of attributes, and the location and documentation of exotic and invasive plants.

This session will describe where we use GPS and augmentations, nationwide coverage, coverage challenges in Alaska, why we need NDGPS, and why it works better than WAAS in broken terrain and masked mountain environments.

Karl Brown
NPS Natural Resource Program Center
1201 Oakridge Drive, Suite 200
Fort Collins , Colorado 80525
United States
Phone: 970-225-3591
Fax: 970-225-3585
E-mail: karl_brown@nps.gov