Tag Archives: wilderness

LandScope America: a tool to visualize land conservation

If you want to visualize your favorite wilderness area or map the protected areas in your city, LandScope America provides a free and convenient resource. This user-friendly GIS tool, a collaborative project of NatureServe and the National Geographic Society, lets you explore protected lands across the country, create maps of conservation projects, and share your work with others.

LandScope Screenshot

Key features of LandScope America

The focal point of LandScope America is an interactive map that overlays data layers, photos, and user-contributed stories. The map includes three key elements:

  • Base maps: three options (street, satellite, or hybrid) are found at the upper-right corner.
  • Themes: these comprise the spatial data that overlay the base map. Options include conservation priorities, protected areas, threats, plants and animals, and ecosystems. Users can change the theme by selecting the drop-down menu in the upper-left corner.

Diverse range of target audiences

One of the key advantages of LandScope America is its versatility for different user groups. Audiences that can benefit from the resource include:

  • Public agencies: In a recent post, we noted that $39 billion is spent annually on conservation in the United States. Public agencies could increase their effectiveness by combining the conservation priorities of public and private organizations in a single map layer. For example, agencies might overlay The Nature Conservancy’s ecoregional priorities with State Wildlife Action Plans and regional greenprints to better understand the level of coordination between various groups.
  • Land trusts: Using the mapping platform, land trusts can create, share, and print maps of conservation projects. For organizations on a tight budget, LandScope America can provide a powerful alternative to expensive GIS packages.
  • Private landowners: For farmers, ranchers, and private timberland owners, LandScope America features useful resources on options and financial incentives for conserving land. Using the map, landowners can see how their property fits into the wider ecological context and learn how providing wildlife habitat can make them eligible for incentive programs such as the Forest Land Enhancement Program.

Mapping in practice

As an example, I mapped how changes in housing density around Denver relate to key wildlife habitat. The following three maps show the rapid rate of projected growth emanating from the city’s center.

Denver_HousingDensity_1970
Denver_HousingDensity_2000
Denver_HousingDensity_2030
The next map shows important nesting areas and wildlife habitat in Colorado. Land trusts and public agencies could use similar maps to understand how projected human development may encroach upon habitat.
CO_State_Plants_Animals

Public expenditures in conservation

I also experimented with the map’s “Conservation by the Numbers” scorecards to examine trends in conservation spending across the West. This data is drawn from the Trust for Public Land’s Conservation Almanac, which tracks acres protected and dollars spent using public funding to buy land for parks and open space, during the time period 1998-2005.

Examining total spending on conservation, we see that California is the largest aggregate spender, with an annual average of $363 million spent on parks and open space protection. Wyoming has the lowest public expenditures, with $2.2 million spent annually on conservation funding. Montana has highest per capita public investments in conservation—roughly $179 per person. On the other end, Nevada spends only $13 per person on conservation. Below is an image from a dashboard we created to visualize the data.

Conservation spending dashboardA wide variety of factors, however, influence the cost of protecting land in a given state. In Washington, it costs an average of $2,044 to conserve an acre of land, but only $14 per acre conserved in Idaho. Several variables could explain this wide gap, including differences in land prices and development pressures. Washington’s high costs may also reflect some high-value acquisitions during the period in question.

Explore beyond your backyard, both near and far

LandScope America also lets you discover and explore open spaces near your own home. Just enter a zip code to find parks and nature preserves, as well as the names of conservation organizations working in the area.

In addition, LandScope America exposes users to more remote wilderness areas through photographs, audio, video, and articles embedded directly in the maps.

Explore your favorite places in the West using LandScope America, and let us know what you learn.

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EcoWest’s mission is to analyze, visualize, and share data on environmental trends in the North American West. Please subscribe to our RSS feed, opt-in for email updates, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

Human footprint maps of Western states and cities

Just a quick post to let you know that I’ve created a gallery of high-resolution maps depicting the human footprint in each of the 11 Western states, plus some major cities in the region.

I wrote about this dataset a few weeks ago and wanted to share some more detailed, zoomed-in views. White indicates areas with the least human impact, followed by green for places where the footprint is minimal, while orange and red areas are where people have done the most to transform native ecosystems.

Below is the gallery, which also available on this page.

The human footprint map is based on the work of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists and was the basis of a 2008 paper in Ecological Applications by Matthias Leu, Steven E. Hanser, and Steven T. Knick. The scientists focused on 14 features, including the location of cities, farms, roads, canals, power lines, oil and gas wells, and human-caused wildfires.

Please let me know if you have any issues viewing the maps. This is the first time I’ve used the WordPress gallery feature and I’m wondering if it’s an effective tool for sharing images.

Same goes for anything on EcoWest: as we get off the ground, we’re looking for feedback, suggestions, and other comments from users so we can make this site as useful as possible. Thanks!

EcoWest’s mission is to analyze, visualize, and share data on environmental trends in the North American West. Please subscribe to our RSS feed, opt-in for email updates, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

The human footprint in the American West

Over the past few years, I’ve been creating slides—hundreds and hundreds them. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a major environmental funder, asked us to take stock of the state of the North American West, one of its geographic priorities. Rather than write a report that would quickly be shelved, we decided to answer the question in PowerPoint by developing a half-dozen presentations that summarize environmental trends (see our summary here).

If I had to pick a “favorite” slide out of the more than 500 I created, it would be the one below, which illustrates the intensity of the human footprint in the region based on an analysis of urbanization, agriculture, transportation networks, energy development, and other factors.

Human footprint in American West

I put “favorite” in quotes because this slide isn’t exactly something to celebrate. Rather, this map offers a stark reminder that we’ve already messed up much of the West

Despite the preponderance of public land in the region, few areas have been spared from direct—and oftentimes permanent—human influence. Even landscapes far from any city or suburb have been irreparably altered by farms, roads, gas wells, invasive species, and a host of other human-driven forces.

[pullquote]Western paradox: much of the region is nominally protected, but humanity’s imprint is already deep and indelible.[/pullquote]

At the same time, this map shows that the West is still home to vast expanses of untrammeled land and some of the wildest terrain left on the continent. In light of climate change, we can no longer describe any place on Earth as pristine. But the blank spaces on this map still retain the natural qualities that have captivated visitors for centuries and they continue to support an amazing array of ecosystems.

Mapping the human footprint in the American West from EcoWest on Vimeo.

Measuring human impacts

The human footprint map is based on the work of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists and was the basis of a 2008 paper in Ecological Applications by Matthias Leu, Steven E. Hanser, and Steven T. Knick.

White indicates areas with the least human impact (5.5% of the region), followed by green for places where the footprint is minimal, while orange and red areas are where people have done the most to transform native ecosystems.

To develop the map, the scientists focused on 14 features, including the location of cities, farms, transportation networks, irrigation canals, power lines, oil and gas wells, and human-caused wildfires. Based on this geographic data, the researchers were able to model how humans influence wildlife populations, both directly as we modify or destroy habitat, and more indirectly, as we introduce non-native predators and invasive species. “These actions,” the researchers write, “can impact plants and wildlife to such an extent that the persistence of populations or entire species is questionable.”

Although the researchers were primarily interested in modeling effects on shrubland species, they produced maps for all 11 Western states that rate the human footprint from 1 (least) to 10 (most). Here are some of the reference locations for each human footprint class:

  1. Yellowstone National Park, Death Valley National Park, and the crest of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California
  2. Mount Rainier National Park, Washington
  3. Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado and Mount Shasta, California
  4. Columbia River Gorge, Oregon
  5. Foothills west of Boulder, Colorado
  6. Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula, Montana
  7. Salinas Valley, California
  8. Agricultural areas in the Snake River Plain, Idaho and in Napa Valley, California
  9. Agricultural areas near Kennewick, Washington
  10. Boise, Idaho, Los Angeles, and agricultural areas south of Fresno, California

What’s really cool about this map is its detailed resolution: 180 meters, or 591 feet. I must confess that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time zooming around this map and ground-truthing it against my travels in the region. If you love spending time in the wilderness, the white and deep green pixels offer a sort of bucket list for backcountry trips. I’ve annotated some in the map below.

an footprint in American West

Farms have biggest footprint

As you might image, many of the most heavily impacted areas are in and around cities, with the metropolises of Southern California, the Bay Area, Puget Sound, and the Colorado Front Range showing up clearly.

But it turns out that agriculture has the biggest footprint in the region, sometimes in places without many people. While the Central Valley of California and the Willamette Valley of Oregon are home to some good-sized cities, there aren’t many residents in the orange and red sections of Southeast Washington and Southern Idaho.

Undeveloped lands still vulnerable

Many of the white and deep green sections are already protected as wilderness areas, usually in national forests or national parks, but sometimes on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Fish and Wildlife Service. In this version below, blue indicates the location of wilderness areas in places such as the Sierra Nevada, Mojave Desert, Northern Cascades, and Northern Rockies. Purple shows where national parks and monuments are located. Larger parks, such as Yellowstone, Glacier, Death Valley, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Canyonlands, and Olympic are clearly visible. Pink depicts so-called Wilderness Study Areas, which the BLM is currently managing as wilderness but which haven’t been permanently protected by Congress.

an footprint in American West

These wilderness areas, parks, monuments, and Wilderness Study Areas cover many of the least disturbed areas, but not all of them. Most of the other areas that are white or deep green are public lands, but they are not receiving the special protections afforded to wilderness and preserves. Even land that is ostensibly “public,” such as the millions of acres of state-owned school-trust land in the West, may be vulnerable to development because state governments help fund their educational systems through the sale and lease of such parcels.

Mapping the human footprint in the West isn’t just an academic exercise. “Because funding for restoration and conservation projects is limited,” the USGS researchers write, “and because there is little room for errors in the management of species of concern, land managers are able to maximize restoration and conservation efforts in areas minimally influenced by the human footprint.”

Poring over these maps, I was surprised by the extent of farming’s footprint and impressed by the size of some undeveloped areas in the Northern Rockies and Southwestern deserts.

What geographic patterns strike you as most meaningful? Does the map match your own experiences in the West?

Data sources

You can learn more about the analysis and download the data on this USGS website. The 2008 Ecological Applications paper is available here and the USGS offers a summary here.

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EcoWest’s mission is to analyze, visualize, and share data on environmental trends in the North American West. Please subscribe to our RSS feed, opt-in for email updates, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.