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Track: Natural Resources and Conservation
Nancy Favour
National Park Service
Rural Route 1 Box 100
Ajo, AZ 85321
Telephone: 520-387-7661
Fax: 520-387-7661
E-mail: nancy_favour@acmail.itd.nps.gov
Thomas Potter, Betsy Wirt
Using GPS and GIS To Manage Critical Habitat of the Sonoran Desert Tortoise at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument
Defining Issue: Biological inventory and monitoring projects, such as the National Park Service's Desert Tortoise Inventory and Monitoring Project, can generate a large volume of complex data. GIS can provide researchers and resource managers with tools for analyzing and mapping potential critical tortoise habitat. GIS Solution: GIS specialists at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument have used general habitat characteristics of the Sonoran desert tortoise to develop a GIS model of potential tortoise habitat within the monument. Working with inventory and monitoring field data, the potential habitat model can be refined. ArcView applications based on the data can give resources managers access to information that will help protect tortoise habitat. Methodology: To build a model of potential tortoise habitat, slope, elevation, vegetation, and land form information were combined. To refine this model, field biologists conducting inventory and monitoring of the Sonoran desert tortoise in Organ Pipe Cactus
National Monument were equipped with Trimble Geoexplorer GPS units to collect relatively accurate locations for field observations. Once the field data was transferred to an ArcInfo format, the data was available for model improvement, query, analysis, map production, archiving, and duplication. Software: Trimble's Pfinder was used to process all GPS data. Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet was used to merge field attributes with GPS data. ArcInfo and ArcView were used to produce a habitat model, conduct analysis, and produce maps.
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