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Track: Natural Resources and Conservation
Brad Holt
Boise Cascade Corporation
PO Box 50
Boise, ID 83728
Telephone: 208-793-2586
Fax: 208-793-2712
E-mail: idahoeco@aol.com
Steve Warren
GIS Planning Tools to Support Ecosystem Management in the Idaho Southern Batholith
Defining Issue: The need to integrate numerous resource variables to provide the capability to quantify ecological diversity, describe ecological complexity, and measure the temporal component in a 5.8 million acre forested ecosystem. GIS Solution: The Boise Cascade Corporation's Idaho Management Project integrated GIS data layers with multiresource inventories into a suite of resource planning tools to support an ecosystem management approach in the Southern Idaho Batholith. The system provides predictive capability, and qualification of ecological land units with data visualization techniques to accomplish development of habitat threshold levels for adequate ecological representation, which provides a basis for determination of desired future conditions within the ecosystem. Methodology: The multiple owner forested landscape is described by development of compatible data layers for habitat type classes and vegetative growth stages. Overlays of these two layers create a layer of ecological land units
that populate a matrix-based ecological land classification system referred to as a ecosystem diversity matrix. The matrix is directly linked to three-dimensional graphical acreage depictions of ecological land units by creating a matrix GIS polygon coverage, transforming it to the desired perspective, and generating vertical shaded bars of acres for each ecological land unit through a database related to the ecological land unit coverage. This graphical matrix toll is not limited to describing acreages, but can describe or illustrate any number of different values by ecological land unit. In addition, existing forest inventories are integrated and linked to the ecological and unit coverage and the graphical matrix through GPS-collected plot information. With current inventories tied to the ecological land unit coverage, the forest can be grown and projected over time with existing growth models to provide temporal predictability of ecological land units across the landscape. With the improved depiction
of the ecosystem diversity matrix we now have the basis for describing historical disturbance regimes, quantifying existing landscape conditions, assessing wildlife habitat quality, and determining desired future conditions. Software: The application was written using ARC Macro Language. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the application and the integration of multiresource forest planning tools in GIS for ecosystem management.
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