PROJECT GOALS

In relation to the Sage Strategic Plan, our goal has been to synthesize current regional information in order to better understand Sage communities, function, the dynamics of encroachment, and long-term management responses. The primary objectives of these goals are to:
1. Promote research for a greater understanding of the long-term efficacy of the     treatments and their ecological implications.
2. Benefit regional land management planning efforts by providing relational and     GIS databases of BLM sage removal and re-vegetation practices on the     Colorado Plateau.


COMPLETED PROJECT TASKS

1.  Compiled data from 11 BLM Field Offices in hard copy files.
2.  Identified over 100 database variables describing the characteristics of the      treatment methods, purpose,  geographic and vegetative landscape, costs,      time and location
3.  Collected and used a variety of existing GIS coverages
4.  Obtained existing photos relating to treatments
5.  Developed Sage treatment polygon dataset including metadata by delineating      boundaries from BLM treatment location data.
6.  Processed BLM maps and photos to extract data for the image database      aspect of the inventory
7.  Standardized the database fields to look for consistency in BLM treatment     document forms and coding which varied amongst Field Offices and over time
8.  Designed database for non-spatial (Oracle) data with searchable formatting      of data fields
9. A report analysing project results - read here

 

FUTURE GOALS

Establish experimental sites from GIS analysis and perform field ground truthing and monitoring.