Vegetation inventory, mapping, and characterization report, Saguaro National Park: Volume II, association summaries

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Galvin ◽  
Sarah Strudd

The Sonoran Desert Network (SODN) conducted a vegetation mapping and characterization effort at the two districts of Saguaro National Park from 2010 to 2018. This project was completed under the National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Mapping Inventory, which aims to complete baseline mapping and classification inventories at more than 270 NPS units. The vegetation map data were collected to provide park managers with a digital map product that meets national standards of spatial and thematic accuracy, while also placing the vegetation into a regional and national context. A total of 97 distinct vegetation communities were described: 83 exclusively at the Rincon Mountain District, 9 exclusively at the Tucson Mountain District, and 5 occurring in both districts. These communities ranged from low-elevation creosote (Larrea tridentata) shrub-lands spanning broad alluvial fans to mountaintop Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) forests on the slopes of Rincon Peak. All 97 communities were described at the association level, each with detailed narratives including lists of species found in each association, their abundance, landscape features, and overall community structural characteristics. Only 15 of the 97 vegetation types were existing “accepted” types within the National Vegetation Classification (NVC). The others are newly described and specific to Saguaro National Park (and will be proposed for formal status within the NVC). This document is Volume II of three volumes comprising the Saguaro National Park Vegetation Mapping Inventory. This volume provides two-page summaries of the 97 associations identified and mapped during the project, and detailed in Volume I. Summaries are presented by district, starting with the Tucson Mountain District. These summaries are abridged versions of the full association descriptions found in Volume III.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Galvin ◽  
Sarah Studd

The Sonoran Desert Network (SODN) conducted a vegetation mapping and characterization effort at the two districts of Saguaro National Park from 2010 to 2018. This project was completed under the National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Mapping Inventory, which aims to complete baseline mapping and classification inventories at more than 270 NPS units. The vegetation map data were collected to provide park managers with a digital map product that meets national standards of spatial and thematic accuracy, while also placing the vegetation into a regional and national context. A total of 97 distinct vegetation communities were described: 83 exclusively at the Rincon Mountain District, 9 exclusively at the Tucson Mountain District, and 5 occurring in both districts. These communities ranged from low-elevation creosote (Larrea tridentata) shrub-lands spanning broad alluvial fans to mountaintop Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) forests on the slopes of Rincon Peak. All 97 communities were described at the association level, each with detailed narratives including lists of species found in each association, their abundance, landscape features, and overall community structural characteristics. Only 15 of the 97 vegetation types were existing “accepted” types within the NVC. The others are newly de-scribed and specific to Saguaro National Park (and will be proposed for formal status within the NVC). This document is Volume III of three volumes comprising the Saguaro National Park Vegetation Mapping Inventory. This volume provides full type descriptions of the 97 associations identified and mapped during the project, and detailed in Volume I. Volume II provides abridged versions of these full descriptions, briefly describing the floristic and structural characteristics of the vegetation and showing representative photos of associations, their distribution, and an example of the satellite imagery for one polygon.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Ruiz ◽  
Craig Perry ◽  
Alejando Garcia ◽  
Magali Guichardot ◽  
Michael Foguer ◽  
...  

The Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve vegetation mapping project is part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). It is a cooperative effort between the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and the National Park Service’s (NPS) Vegetation Mapping Inventory Program (VMI). The goal of this project is to produce a spatially and thematically accurate vegetation map of Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve prior to the completion of restoration efforts associated with CERP. This spatial product will serve as a record of baseline vegetation conditions for the purpose of: (1) documenting changes to the spatial extent, pattern, and proportion of plant communities within these two federally-managed units as they respond to hydrologic modifications resulting from the implementation of the CERP; and (2) providing vegetation and land-cover information to NPS park managers and scientists for use in park management, resource management, research, and monitoring. This mapping project covers an area of approximately 7,400 square kilometers (1.84 million acres [ac]) and consists of seven mapping regions: four regions in Everglades National Park, Regions 1–4, and three in Big Cypress National Preserve, Regions 5–7. The report focuses on the mapping effort associated with the Northwest Coastal Everglades (NWCE), Region 4 , in Everglades National Park. The NWCE encompasses a total area of 1,278 square kilometers (493.7 square miles [sq mi], or 315,955 ac) and is geographically located to the south of Big Cypress National Preserve, west of Shark River Slough (Region 1), and north of the Southwest Coastal Everglades (Region 3). Photo-interpretation was performed by superimposing a 50 × 50-meter (164 × 164-feet [ft] or 0.25 hectare [0.61 ac]) grid cell vector matrix over stereoscopic, 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) spatial resolution, color-infrared aerial imagery on a digital photogrammetric workstation. Photo-interpreters identified the dominant community in each cell by applying majority-rule algorithms, recognizing community-specific spectral signatures, and referencing an extensive ground-truth database. The dominant vegetation community within each grid cell was classified using a hierarchical classification system developed specifically for this project. Additionally, photo-interpreters categorized the absolute cover of cattail (Typha sp.) and any invasive species detected as either: Sparse (10–49%), Dominant (50–89%), or Monotypic (90–100%). A total of 178 thematic classes were used to map the NWCE. The most common vegetation classes are Mixed Mangrove Forest-Mixed and Transitional Bayhead Shrubland. These two communities accounted for about 10%, each, of the mapping area. Other notable classes include Short Sawgrass Marsh-Dense (8.1% of the map area), Mixed Graminoid Freshwater Marsh (4.7% of the map area), and Black Mangrove Forest (4.5% of the map area). The NWCE vegetation map has a thematic class accuracy of 88.4% with a lower 90th Percentile Confidence Interval of 84.5%.


Author(s):  
G. Jones ◽  
D. Ehle

The National Park Service and the USGS Biological Resources Division have jointly established a program to map the vegetation in all of the Park Service's units with roughly the same methodology and using the same vegetation classification scheme. Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming has been selected for mapping in 2002 and 2003 as part of this national program. At Grand Teton National Park, the Bureau of Reclamation will interpret aerial photos and map the vegetation. The entities mapped by the Bureau will be related to vegetation types from a classification to be produced by NatureServe, an organization representing natural heritage programs and conservation data centers throughout North and Central America. The data on which the vegetation classification is based will be collected by the staff from the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database, working with National Park Service and NatureServe scientists. In conjunction with the vegetation classification and mapping, Park Service personnel will produce a model to predict fuel loads throughout the Park. The model will predict amounts and types of fuel in the vegetation classification units, and will elucidate the relationship between fuel loads and variables such as slope, aspect, and elevation. Field work for the Grand Teton National Park Vegetation Mapping Project is to be conducted over three summers. The effort in the first two summers will be dedicated to vegetation data collection, and the third summer will be dedicated to on-the-ground accuracy assessment of the preliminary vegetation map created by the photo interpreters.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Vaughn ◽  
Hanna J. Cortner

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-123
Author(s):  
Michael A. Capps

Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial is an example of one memorial site that has successfully managed to retain relevance for nearly one hundred years by adapting to changes in scholarship and the expectations of its visitors. Initially created as a purely commemorative site, it has evolved into one where visitors can actively engage with the Lincoln story. By embracing an interpretive approach to managing the site, the National Park Service has been able to add an educational component to the experience of visiting the memorial that complements its commemorative nature.


2019 ◽  
pp. 68-72
Author(s):  
E. A. Volkova

A monograph “Vegetation and biotopes of the “Narochansky” National Park was published in Minsk, Belarus in 2017, edited by A. V. Pugachevsky (Grummo et al., 2017). It includes the Map of terrestrial vegetation (S. 1 : 60 000) and the Map of biotopes (S. 1 : 60 000). Some small-scale maps such as the Map of changes in forest cover of the “Narochansky” National Park for the period 1985–2016, the Map of forest loss in the “Narochansky” National Park for the period 1985–2016 and a series of inventory and analytical maps on the basin of the Naroch Lake are given. This monograph can be considered as a small regional Atlas with detailed explanatory texts to the maps. It presents the experience on vegetation mapping accumulated in the Laboratory of Geobotany and Vegetation mapping of the Institute of Experimental Botany of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. Despite some critical comments, mainly concerning the biotope map, this publication of Belarusian geobotanists deserves an approval. They received the full answers to the questions posed: “What do we protect?” and “What is a current state of the vegetation of the National Park and the main trends of its dynamics? Cartographic design is made at a high level; the maps have both scientific and practical importance in the planning of environmental and economic activities.


1996 ◽  
pp. 64-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nguen Nghia Thin ◽  
Nguen Ba Thu ◽  
Tran Van Thuy

The tropical seasonal rainy evergreen broad-leaved forest vegetation of the Cucphoung National Park has been classified and the distribution of plant communities has been shown on the map using the relations of vegetation to geology, geomorphology and pedology. The method of vegetation mapping includes: 1) the identifying of vegetation types in the remote-sensed materials (aerial photographs and satellite images); 2) field work to compile the interpretation keys and to characterize all the communities of a study area; 3) compilation of the final vegetation map using the combined information. In the classification presented a number of different level vegetation units have been identified: formation classes (3), formation sub-classes (3), formation groups (3), formations (4), subformations (10) and communities (19). Communities have been taken as mapping units. So in the vegetation map of the National Park 19 vegetation categories has been shown altogether, among them 13 are natural primary communities, and 6 are the secondary, anthropogenic ones. The secondary succession goes through 3 main stages: grassland herbaceous xerophytic vegetation, xerophytic scrub, dense forest.


Author(s):  
Terence Young ◽  
Alan MacEachern ◽  
Lary Dilsaver

This essay explores the evolving international relationship of the two national park agencies that in 1968 began to offer joint training classes for protected-area managers from around the world. Within the British settler societies that dominated nineteenth century park-making, the United States’ National Park Service (NPS) and Canada’s National Parks Branch were the most closely linked and most frequently cooperative. Contrary to campfire myths and nationalist narratives, however, the relationship was not a one-way flow of information and motivation from the US to Canada. Indeed, the latter boasted a park bureaucracy before the NPS was established. The relationship of the two nations’ park leaders in the half century leading up to 1968 demonstrates the complexity of defining the influences on park management and its diffusion from one country to another.


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