Interagency Clearinghouse of Ecological Information

About ILAP

The Integrated Landscape Assessment Project (ILAP) project is producing consistent, landscape-wide vegetation mapping across Oregon and Washington. The project will also produce a series of land use, vegetation, wildlife, and socioeconomic models that can be used to assess current conditions, currently expected trends, and possible implications of alternative policies and management actions. This effort will be ongoing, adapting to changing agency planning and assessment needs.

Mid-scale assessments and plans are needed by several state and federal agencies, including the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF), Region 6 USDA National Forests, and BLM Districts. Key issues for these agencies include planning for and assessing fire risks, fuel conditions, wildlife habitats, old-growth forests, forest products, rangeland conditions, potential biomass supplies, and others. The purpose of this website is to ensure that landscape level data and integrated analysis tools are available for use by agency staffs, policy makers, and other public and private users.

How ILAP Accomplished This

Current landscape-wide vegetation data was developed using Gradient Nearest Neighbor methods (Ohmann and Gregory 2002) using FIA/CVS plots and/or stand exams (www.fsl.orst.edu/lemma/gnnpac). Areas where GNN does not work (e.g. non-forest and other gaps) will be filled from the current version of data from LANDFIRE, SAGEMAP, GAP, and other sources.

The ILAP Technical Team used software from ESSA, called Vegetation Dynamics Development Tool (VDDT). The initial vegetation conditions from GNN were used in the simple state-and-transition models, which treats vegetation as simplified combinations of cover types and structure stages within each potential vegetation type (PVT). Boxes are linked by arrows, or transitions, that can be natural disturbances, management actions, or growth and development. The ILAP project built and ran current management and natural disturbance scenarios.

Local units can build and run planning scenarios for smaller areas, as needed. The GNN data, PVT maps and VDDT models are all available here for users to download and manipulate for their own planning and management scenarios.

Products

  • Current vegetation cover type, structure type in 30m pixels, from GNN
  • Potential vegetation groups and other GIS coverages
  • VDDT models with documentation
  • Current management scenario modeling results
  • Historical scenario modeling results