Summary

Justification

Gap analysis is a program of the USGS Biological Resources Division that maps the distribution of plant communities and select animal species and compares these distributions with land stewardship to identify biotic elements at potential risk of endangerment. The initial Gap Analysis Project for Utah was completed in 1995 and represented the first ever detailed maps of these biotic elements and reports of their conservation status. Considerable advances have been made since this initial project and Utah has been invited to participate in an update that would be undertaken as part of a coordinated regional effort.

Regional cooperative efforts among GAP project states have emerged in the Upper Midwest, Great Plains, Northeast, and Southeast. They are proving to be a very effective way to conduct GAP by maintaining the state business model but capturing efficiency and better sharing of data, methods, and tools through regional cooperation and integration. Success of this effort has lead to this proposal to include Utah in the program’s first formalized multi-state regional effort to include the five states (AZ, CO, NM, NV, and UT) comprising the southwest region. Utah was the first state to complete a GAP analysis and developed an innovative approach for mapping large geographic areas using multi-scene Landsat mosaics. This approach is the process that will be used for the Southwest GAP project.

Since the completion of the initial Utah GAP analysis, the final product and supporting data sets have been used extensively by state and federal collaborators to assist in meeting land management goals. While the collaboration between agencies and Utah State University was strong during the initial mapping effort, this subsequent GAP effort promises to have a much stronger collaborative involvement. Follow-on applications with state and federal collaborators should include assistance in fire management, noxious weed mapping, land cover change, urban growth, and the subsequent impacts of such growth on wildlife habitat and loss in biodiversity. The 5-state project will further improve these efforts by allowing land managers to evaluate landscapes within and between ecoregions. This will improve our understanding of the ecology of various land cover components and the wildlife that interacts within each habitat.

Additional research and management advances stemming from this project will include improved data dissemination, coordination, and collaboration between managers in the 5 states. Since the final product will be an inclusive 5-state vegetation map and suite of ancillary data, this will help set the environmental database standards for regional efforts and coordinated land management efforts. Research into large landscape, relatively intensive vegetation mapping will improve our ability to radiometrically and spatially standardize remote sensing data in order to properly map across all 5 states. There have been some significant strides in the science and methodology of developing large landscape image mosaics. This effort will further enhance this research.

Mapping of biotic elements and land stewardship will generally follow and improve upon previous GAP methods as detailed in the program handbook but will be conducted without regard to state boundaries and in a regional cooperative manner. This approach will maintain consistency with previous work, increase efficiency and data quality, and greatly increase utility of the data for regional analysis by GAP and other regional programs.

Overview