Statement_of_Work_-_Land_Cover_Survey_ _Mapping.pdf

Statement of Work

Project Description: This project focuses on collection of remotely-sensed data used to stratify vegetation and ground cover attributes (collectively, “functional groups”) at specific resolutions over 50,000 acres of rangeland in Harney County, OR (Figure 1). Mapping areas include the ARS-administered Northern Great Basin Experimental Range (16,000 acres), and approximately 34,000 acres of nearby rangeland administered by the Department of State Lands. These data will be used to test relationships between land management practices and functional group cover at large spatial scales. We will also test the utility of these data for remotely classifying vegetation states important as habitat to greater sage-grouse. These vegetation states have been defined in state and transition models developed in a cooperative effort between ARS-Burns, Oregon State University, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (Figure 2). Functional group mapping will follow very specific techniques that we wish to test the utility of, relative to other methodologies used to collect similar data.

Figure 1. Study sites to be mapped in southeast Oregon. Areas to be mapped are indicated as “Analysis Area” in this illustration.

Figure 2. State and transition model used in management of sage-grouse habitat in Oregon. ARS-Burns will compare different remotely-sensed vegetation mapping technologies with respect to their ability to classify areas of rangeland into different vegetation states. States (top) shaded in green indicate potential year-round habitat suitability for sage-grouse. States in shaded yellow and red indicate potential seasonal habitat and non-habitat, respectively. “Native plant resiliency” (lower left) indicates the relative likelihood of a plant community to recover to a native plant-dominated state following disturbance and decreases with loss of large perennial bunchgrasses. Persistent transitions (lower right) between states are depicted with solid arrows, while non-persistent transitions are arrows with dotted lines.

Deliverables:

Functional groups to be assessed include: Perennial herbaceous vegetation, annual herbaceous vegetation, sagebrush, other shrubs, bare ground, and juniper (only juniper equal to or less than approximately 2 meters will be considered). All deliverables should be completed before January 1, 2016.

1) Take overhead ground-based images in a quantity sufficient to characterize extant variation in functional group cover values across the study areas. These images will be taken at 2-mm resolution and will be georeferenced to within +/- 10cm.

B A

C

D

N at iv e

Pl an t C om m un ity R es ili en ce

Threats

A B

A C

A D

B D

C D

Low severity fire

High severity fire/ Overgrazing

Overgrazing

High severity fire

Conservation Measures

B A

C A

C A

D B

Time/Sagebrush planting

Shrub reduction/ Grass seeding

Control annuals/ Revegetate

Sagebrush - Perennial

Herbaceous State

Perennial Herbaceous State

Exotic Annual Grass

State

Degraded Sagebrush

State

A B C D

Loss of Perennial Bunchgrasses

Fire

Improved grazing management

2) Use color recognition software to develop functional group cover value assessment of ground-based images.

3) Use results for ground-based images to train 1-meter resolution satellite imagery to produce a 1-m resolution continuous coverage map of all functional group attributes across the study sites. Satellite imagery classification should rely on peer-review journal-published techniques that have been proven to explain at least 80% of the variation in ground-based data.

4) Use deliverable #3 to train 30-meter resolution satellite imagery (Landsat) to identify functional group cover across the study sites. Classification of 30-meter resolution satellite imagery should rely on peer-review journal-published techniques that have been proven to explain at least 90% of the variation in the 1-meter resolution data.

5) The specific techniques used in deliverables 1 – 4 must have proven success in mapping sagebrush plant community attributes at broad spatial scales (over 1 million acres).

6) Meet in person with staff at ARS-Burns, in Burns, Oregon to provide an overview of the mapping products and answer any questions they have.