Modern land management practices require increasing levels of information to successfully compete and comply with strict regulatory and environmental constraints. To effectively consider the cumulative impacts of various land management decisions on air, soil, water, fish, and wildlife, and their associated economic impacts, these effects must be addressed at the watershed, landscape, and regional scales over varying time periods and in the context of active as well as passive ecosystem dynamics and disturbance patterns. Traditional site specific information must be integrated into a broader view for large scale planing efforts. As more organizations embark on watershed analysis and habitat conservation planning, the ability to access a well constructed data base for repeated analysis under changing management scenarios and regulatory constraints will play a vital role in this process.
This paper discusses the use of GIS in developing habitat conservation plans. These large scale planning efforts required extensive amounts of data including a variety of GIS data layers. To insure development of a cost effective GIS database, existing information from a variety of sources and scales was integrated into a consistent form for these projects. In addition to integrating existing proprietary data, digital data from public or other sources was used to create the extensive coverages necessary for watershed and/or conservation planning efforts. Finally, Landsat TM image data can be used to generate current vegetation conditions that are consistent across ownerships and assist in change detection analysis for monitoring.
Once complete, these databases were utilized to examine a wide range of environmental, economic, and social factors that can be affected by land management practices. Questions that were examined include issues related to water and air quality, population demographics, soil stability and compaction, historical, current, and future vegetative conditions, fish and wildlife habitat, economic impacts, monitoring, and future research needs. The resulting database and analysis results were utilized as an aid to resource managers in making more informed decisions with regards to a wide array of land planning issues.