Exploring the Use of Ecosystem Services Conceptual Models to Account for the Benefits of Public Lands: An Example from National Forest Planning in the United States

A shared understanding of the benefits and tradeoffs to people from alternative land management strategies is critical to successful decision-making for managing public lands and fostering shared stewardship. This study describes an approach for identifying and monitoring the types of resource benefits and tradeoffs considered in National Forest planning in the United States under the 2012 Planning Rule and demonstrates the use of tools for conceptualizing the production of ecosystem services and benefits from alternative land management strategies. Efforts to apply these tools through workshops and engagement exercises provide opportunities to explore and highlight measures, indicators, and data sources for characterizing benefits and tradeoffs in collaborative environments involving interdisciplinary planning teams. Conceptual modeling tools are applied to a case study examining the social and economic benefits of recreation on the Ashley National Forest. The case study illustrates how these types of tools facilitate dialog for planning teams to discuss alternatives and key ecosystem service outcomes, create easy to interpret visuals that map details in plans, and provide a basis for selecting ecosystem service (socio-economic) metrics. These metrics can be used to enhance environmental impact analysis, and help satisfy the goals of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 2012 Planning Rule, and shared stewardship initiatives. The systematic consideration of ecosystem services outcomes and metrics supported by this approach enhanced dialog between members of the Forest planning team, allowed for a more transparent process in identification of key linkages and outcomes, and identified impacts and outcomes that may not have been apparent to the sociologist who is lacking the resource specific expertise of these participants. As a result, the use of the Ecosystem Service Conceptual Model (ESCM) process may result in reduced time for internal reviews and greater comprehension of anticipated outcomes and impacts of proposed management in the plan revision Environmental Impact Statement amongst the planning team.

Developing UAV-Based Forest Spatial Information and Evaluation Technology for Efficient Forest Management

Forest spatial information is regularly established and managed as basic data for national forest planning and forest policy establishment. Among them, the grade of vegetation conservation shall be investigated and evaluated according to the value of vegetation conservation. As the collection of field data over large or remote areas is difficult, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used for this purpose. Consequently, there is a need for research on UAV-monitoring and three-dimensional (3D) image generation techniques. In this study, a new method that can efficiently collect and analyze UAV spatial data to survey and assess forests was developed. Both UAV-based and LiDAR imaging methods were evaluated in conjunction with the ground control point measurement method for forest surveys. In addition, by fusing the field survey database of each target site and the UAV optical and LiDAR images, the Gongju, Samcheok, and Seogwipo regions were analyzed based on deep learning. The kappa value showed 0.59, 0.47, and 0.78 accuracy for each of the sites in terms of vegetation type (artificial or natural), and 0.68, 0.53, and 0.62 accuracy in terms of vegetation layer structure. The results of comparative analysis with ecological natural maps by establishing vegetation conservation levels show that about 83.9% of the areas are consistent. The findings verified the applicability of this UAV-based approach for the construction of geospatial information on forests. The proposed method can be useful for improving the efficiency of the Vegetation Conservation Classification system and for conducting high-resolution monitoring in forests worldwide.