Regional-scale management maps for forested areas of the Southeastern United States and the US Pacific Northwest

Marsik, Matthew; Staub, Caroline G.; Kleindl, William; Hall, Jaclyn; Fu, Chiung-Shiuan; Yang, Di; Stevens, Forrest R.; Binford, Michael W.

doi:10.1038/sdata.2018.165

Cited by 19 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…1, inset A) within the US Pacific Northwest region. This area contains 10.4% of the forest area in the conterminous US 19 . The region includes three distinct ecological regions: (1) dense coastal forest dominated by western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) and Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), and montane forests of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziessii), hemlock, and true firs (Abies spp.)…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of ownership patterns on cross-boundary wildfires

Barros

Day

Spies

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Understanding ownership effects on large wildfires is a precursor to the development of risk governance strategies that better protect people and property and restore fire-adapted ecosystems. We analyzed wildfire events in the Pacific Northwest from 1984 to 2018 to explore how area burned responded to ownership, asking whether particular ownerships burned disproportionately more or less, and whether these patterns varied by forest and grass/shrub vegetation types. While many individual fires showed indifference to property lines, taken as a whole, we found patterns of disproportionate burning for both forest and grass/shrub fires. We found that forest fires avoided ownerships with a concentration of highly valued resources—burning less than expected in managed US Forest Service forested lands, private non-industrial, private industrial, and state lands—suggesting the enforcement of strong fire protection policies. US Forest Service wilderness was the only ownership classification that burned more than expected which may result from the management of natural ignitions for resource objectives, its remoteness or both. Results from this study are relevant to inform perspectives on land management among public and private entities, which may share boundaries but not fire management goals, and support effective cross-boundary collaboration and shared stewardship across all-lands.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of ownership patterns on cross-boundary wildfires

Barros

Day

Spies

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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“…Moreover, in almost all cases, planted fruit crop fields maintain a defined shape, and the trees are grown in lines, which facilitates their differentiation. The random forest algorithm can identify and map such land uses to keep track of these attributes and decision rules during the mapping process [41,42].…”

Section: Cultivated Landmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Water 2021, 13, x FOR PEER REVIEW 6 of 20 algorithm can identify and map such land uses to keep track of these attributes and decision rules during the mapping process [41,42].…”

Section: Average Monthly Rainfall In Iuwmamentioning

confidence: 99%

Informing Equitable Water and Food Policies through Accurate Spatial Information on Irrigated Areas in Smallholder Farming Systems

Magidi

Koppen

Nhamo

et al. 2021

Water

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Accurate information on irrigated areas’ spatial distribution and extent are crucial in enhancing agricultural water productivity, water resources management, and formulating strategic policies that enhance water and food security and ecologically sustainable development. However, data are typically limited for smallholder irrigated areas, which is key to achieving social equity and equal distribution of financial resources. This study addressed this gap by delineating disaggregated smallholder and commercial irrigated areas through the random forest algorithm, a non-parametric machine learning classifier. Location within or outside former apartheid “homelands” was taken as a proxy for smallholder, and commercial irrigation. Being in a medium rainfall area, the huge irrigation potential of the Inkomati-Usuthu Water Management Area (UWMA) is already well developed for commercial crop production outside former homelands. However, information about the spatial distribution and extent of irrigated areas within former homelands, which is largely informal, was missing. Therefore, we first classified cultivated lands in 2019 and 2020 as a baseline, from where the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was used to distinguish irrigated from rainfed, focusing on the dry winter period when crops are predominately irrigated. The mapping accuracy of 84.9% improved the efficacy in defining the actual spatial extent of current irrigated areas at both smallholder and commercial spatial scales. The proportion of irrigated areas was high for both commercial (92.5%) and smallholder (96.2%) irrigation. Moreover, smallholder irrigation increased by over 19% between 2019 and 2020, compared to slightly over 7% in the commercial sector. Such information is critical for policy formulation regarding equitable and inclusive water allocation, irrigation expansion, land reform, and food and water security in smallholder farming systems.

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“…We used land cover (CDL) and forest management data (Marsik et al, 2017 to derive datasets that characterized three levels of landscape fragmentation (Jaeger et al, 2008), described by increasing intensities of land use. To measure fragmentation, the geometry of fragmenting elements needs to be explicitly provided by stipulating the landscape elements that form the fragmentation geometry, or FG (Jaeger et al, 2008).…”

Section: Supporting: Landscape Structure Biodiversity and Habitatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecosystem Services in Working Lands of the Southeastern USA

Coffin

Sclater

Swain

et al. 2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Agriculture and natural systems interweave in the southeastern US, including Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, where topographic, edaphic, hydrologic, and climatic gradients form nuanced landscapes. These are largely working lands under private control, comprising mosaics of timberlands, grazinglands, and croplands. According to the “ecosystem services” framework, these landscapes are multifunctional. Generally, working lands are highly valued for their provisioning services, and to some degree cultural services, while regulating and supporting services are harder to quantify and less appreciated. Trade-offs and synergies exist among these services. Regional ecological assessments tend to broadly paint working lands as low value for regulating and supporting services. But this generalization fails to consider the complexity and tight spatial coupling of land uses and land covers evident in such regions. The challenge of evaluating multifunctionality and ecosystem services is that they are not spatially concordant. While there are significant acreages of natural systems embedded in southeastern working lands, their spatial characteristics influence the balance of tradeoffs between ecosystem services at differing scales. To better understand this, we examined the configuration of working lands in the southeastern US by comparing indicators of ecosystem services at multiple scales. Indicators included measurements of net primary production (provisioning), agricultural Nitrogen runoff (regulating), habitat measured at three levels of land use intensity, and biodiversity (supporting). We utilized a hydrographic and ecoregional framework to partition the study region. We compared indicators aggregated at differing scales, ranging from broad ecoregions to local landscapes focused on the USDA Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) Network sites in Florida and Georgia. Subregions of the southeastern US differ markedly in contributions to overall ecosystem services. Provisioning services, characterized by production indicators, were very high in northern subregions of Georgia, while supporting services, characterized by habitat and biodiversity indicators, were notably higher in smaller subregions of Florida. For supporting services, the combined contributions of low intensity working lands with embedded natural systems made a critical difference in their regional evaluation. This analysis demonstrated how the inclusion of working lands combined with examining these at different scales shifted our understanding of ecosystem services trade-offs and synergies in the southeastern United States.

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Regional-scale management maps for forested areas of the Southeastern United States and the US Pacific Northwest

Cited by 19 publications

References 31 publications

Effects of ownership patterns on cross-boundary wildfires

Effects of ownership patterns on cross-boundary wildfires

Informing Equitable Water and Food Policies through Accurate Spatial Information on Irrigated Areas in Smallholder Farming Systems

Ecosystem Services in Working Lands of the Southeastern USA

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