The Wilderness Society
The Wilderness Society
(TWS) is a non-profit organization established in
1935. TWS is committed to the protection and preservation of all public
lands. This includes the analysis and review of management strategies for
these lands. TWS's Spatial Analysis Team plays a key role in the evaluation
of land management plans and their effects using GIS and remote sensing.
THE WILDERNESS SOCIETY'S CENTER FOR LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS:
OUTREACH AND COOPERATION EFFORTS:
The Wilderness Society's (TWS) GIS and remote sensing program, The Center
for Landscape Analysis, has grown into a strong contributor to the national
and regional conservation efforts of many organizations. These organizations
include other environmental groups, federal, state and local government
agencies, and Congressional offices. This paper will describe past, current
and future efforts to cooperate with, and contribute to, the work of these
organizations.
Outreach and cooperative efforts take many forms including a series
of workshops to explain and clarify President Clinton's Northwest forest
plan. The workshops were attended by over 250 citizen activists. Aside
from this project, the Center continues to fill general requests for mapped
information with help from volunteers trained in GIS at the Center. The
Center also distributes its ancient forest, Pacific salmon and Northwest
forest plan data in digital and mapped formats to a number of environmental
groups, governmental agencies and private industries. Volunteers and staff
of other environmental organizations such as the Greater Ecosystem Alliance
and Sierra Club have been using the facilities of the Center to learn and
build their GIS skills while creating and analyzing data for their own
uses. In the future, the Center will cooperate on projects and provide
information to the Forest Service, the Park Service, the Environmental
Protection Agency, LightHawk, Sierra Club, Washington Wilderness Coalition,
and many others.
Central Cascade Checkerboard Lands
Serious habitat fragmentation exists in the central cascades
of Washington due to logging. The problem is accentuated by the checkerboard
ownership pattern of private industrial timber land and U. S. Forest Service
land. The Center for Landscape Analysis was asked by local activists to
use GIS and remote sensing technology to demonstrate the resulting patterns
of habitat degradation.
The attached map illustrates the patterns of land ownership that lead
to the serious habitat fragmentation. Yet maps alone do not tell the story
of what is happening to the forest ecosystem. Raw satellite data donated
by NASA Goddard was converted into the two attached color images to illustrate
the effects of logging practices across the landscape of fragmented ownership.
The first image was generated to mimic traditional color
photography. In this image the forest appears green and the darker greens
represent older forest. The second image is a false color infrared image.
In this image the forest ranges from green or yellow in recent clear cuts
to orange of middle aged forest to brown of late successional forest. It
is not what the human eye is accustomed to seeing but contains a great
deal more information about the forested landscape. For instance forest
areas that appear uniform in the first image show a variety of forest harvest
ages in the infrared image. Please see the map legends for further description
of colors and features.
These images illustrate the complex pattern of the forest across the
central cascades of Washington. Forest that was once uniform late successional
forest broken only by natural physiographic features and local natural
disturbances, can now be seen as a highly fragmented landscape. Imagine
the first image as it would have appeared a century ago – vast expanses
of dark green broken only by lakes and alpine rock and snow. The checkerboard
of alternation forest stands and clear cuts can be seen in the central
portion of the image. Clear cuts across the image range from small cuts
on the U. S. Forest Service land to square mile clear cuts in the checkerboard
ownership, to clear cuts of several square miles in large areas of private
timber ownership. In addition to logging, other man-made barriers or brakes
in the natural habitat can be seen such as highways and power lines.
These images have proved valuable tools for education a wide variety
of interest groups. Without enlargements of these images at planning meetings
it would have been nearly impossible to give participants an idea of the
tremendous human impact and resulting patterns imposed on the landscape.
From the new awareness generated by the images, people were able to move
forward to discuss critical issues of habitat fragmentation, contiguous
core habitats, migration corridors, and ultimately the land exchanges and
purchases needed to improve the forest habitat. Efforts are now underway
to eliminate the checkerboard ownership pattern and its destructive effects
on the forest ecosystem.
Roadless Areas in Northeast Washington State, Columbia
Mountains Wilderness Proposal
The Center for Landscape Analysis has nearly completed a GIS inventory
of the last remaining roadless areas in the upper Columbia River Basin.
The map entitled Roadless Areas in Northeast Washington State shows the
data for northeast Washington. The areas shaded light purple show the inventoried
roadless areas, regions documented in the forest plans for each National
Forest. These have been updated in areas of recent logging and road incursions.
Uninventoried roadless areas, in the darker purple, were located by local
environmentalists and contain significant additional roadless habitat,
that was not included in the Forest Service’s inventory. All roadless areas
are currently unprotected, even though their existence is important to
the well being of a multitude of plants, animals, and people.
This inventory of intact habitat will be used by The Wilderness Society
and conservationists throughout the Northwest. It will be used to assess
the environmental impact statement due out soon from the federal interagency
Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, affecting land management
across the multistate region. In addition, local activists are already
using the information for local forest planning activities.
The Kettle Range Conservation Group in eastern Washington requested
GIS assistance in generating a new wilderness proposal for the Columbia
Mountains. The Columbia Mountains are highly regarded for their excellent
hunting, fishing, and other recreational attributes. After nearly a century
of logging, roading, and other forms of resource extraction, only islands
of native forest remain. These wilderness islands contain critical wildlife
habitat and offer outstanding recreational opportunities. This area also
represents an important pathway for migrating species of wildlife between
the U.S. and Canada, and Idaho and Washington state.
The draft wilderness proposal is displayed on the map entitled Columbia
Mountains Wilderness Proposal Proposed by The Kettle Range Conservation
Group, Northeast Washington State. The Columbia Mountains Wilderness Proposal,
shown in dark purple, is derived from the roadless layer with the addition
of acreage from proposed road closures. By entering this information into
GIS, we are able not only to display it, but also to calculate acreage
and, along with other ecologic data layers, use it to analyze this important
ecosystem. The Wilderness Society is using GIS to help the Kettle Range
Conservation Group protect this vital area.
Late-Successional Rankings and Areas of Late-Successional
Emphasis, Eldorado National Forest
Critical to the initial assessment of the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem
Project (SNEP) is a review of the forest data generated by SNEP scientists.
The information displayed on the attached map is accessible only to individuals
and organizations with GIS technology. Yet, these data hold key information
about the condition of the forest and future management strategies.
This map displays the SNEP results of forest studies in the El Dorado National
Forest. In simple terms, the darker the green the closer the forest is
to being an old growth forest and the areas with red diagonal lines are
areas identified as important for future ecosystem protection.
The solid colors on the map indicate the late-successional forest structure
rankings. SNEP scientists believe that forest structure is indicative of
the whether or not a forest is functioning as a late-successional or old
growth forest. Ranking is on a scale of from 0 to 5 with 0 meaning the
forest has little or no late-successional structure and 5 indicating extensive
late-successional structure. The red hashed areas delineate the late successional
emphasis (ALSE) reserve system proposed by SNEP scientists. The SNEP report
defines the ALSE reserve system as "areas where maintenance of high-quality
LS/OG (late-successional/old growth) forest is emphasized and activities
that detract from this objective are minimized or eliminated."
SNEP GIS data, such as the forest data displayed here, form a rich base
of information about the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem. We anticipate that many
pieces of this data will become building blocks for improved land management
strategies for the Sierra Nevada. The Wilderness Society’s challenge is
to make this voluminous and complex set of data accessible in useful, educational
formats so it may be used by all citizens interested in the future of the
Sierra Nevada.
Sierra Nevada Bioregion
In the planning stages of the Sierra Nevada regional project, we realized
there is a lack of awareness of the Sierra Nevada as a distinct region.
Residents of the Sierras sometime consider them selves connected to adjacent
communities in or just outside of the Sierra Nevada but seldom with communities
North or South along the mountain range. Yet, a wide range of economic,
ecologic, an social concerns are shared by communities throughout the range.
The attached Sierra Nevada regional map was created to help people begin
to think of the Sierras as a distinct region. It contains common geographic
features and a regional boundary defined by the federally sponsored Sierra
Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP). The map was generated from GIS data in
The Center for Landscape Analysis’ archive and new data from SNEP. This
initial product is being shared among project staff and cooperators at
other organizations. It is a base upon which we will add more sophisticated
data over the course of the project.
GIS ANALYSES AND PRODUCTS
TWS and other environmental groups have traditionally reviewed forest
plans without the aid of a GIS. Although these plans are scrutinized closely
by experts, they rely on the summary figures provided in government agency
reports without an opportunity to double check their results, generate
additional figures not provided or to produce our own visual representation
of a forest plan. The Clinton plan review combined established TWS expertise
in forestry, biology and environmental law with the analytic and cartographic
capabilities of a GIS. The ability to quickly produce figures from the
GIS was important since there was less than 3 months for the draft plan
and only one month for the final plan in which comments and recommendations
could be submitted to the FEMAT.
The increase in the use of GIS by governmental agencies, in particular
the Forest Service (USFS), prompted TWS to use GIS capabilities to evaluate
their work. The ability to access the coverages and databases in the same
format as they were created (ArcInfo and UNIX) allowed TWS to recreate
the USFS's analyses with the assurance that we were working with the same
data and that no errors would be introduced by the conversion of data.
One difference between TWS's analyses and the USFS's analyses is the fact
that TWS used our own ancient forest data as opposed to data from the USFS.
Text and graphics: The Wilderness Society
January 2, 1997
Susan E. Balikov
GIS Coordinator
The Wilderness Society
1424 4th Ave., Ste. 816
Seattle, WA 98101
Telephone: (206) 624-6430
Fax: (206) 624-7101
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