FIA Techniques
Mapping
Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS)
Interior-West
Paul L. Patterson
Tracey S. Frescino
FIA Program – Techniques
Inventory and monitor disturbance effects and impacts
• Exploring and mapping rates of disturbance across the U.S.
• Monitoring land cover change using historic data
• Effects of projected climate change on species distribution patterns
Supporting land management planning and monitoring needs
• ForCaMF – to understand the effects of management activities on the forest
carbon
• LANDFIRE – a comprehensive set of spatial layers of vegetation and fuels
• Rapid assessment of changes in U.S. forests from wildfire
Develop spatial tools and products
• Automating mapping procedures (ModelMap)
FIA Program – Techniques
Questions:
How many acres of suitable habitat for a particular species?
..and where is the suitable habitat?
How much biomass of trees was affected by disturbance?
Where is the distribution of tree species across the landscape?
..and how will this distribution change in the future?
Where are the best areas to harvest?
What areas are potential risk of fire or insect?
Techniques – Mapping Examples
Regional efforts – National Forests
Support forest planning
Delineate resources across forest
Identify structural diversity
Support wildlife habitat modeling
efforts
• Describe historical fire patterns
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Techniques - Mapping Examples
Regional efforts – Statewide
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Support state reports
Suitable harvest areas
Land use change
Resources lost to catastrophic events
Insect and disease outbreaks
Fire risk
Predicted Stand Age, Yellowstone NP
Stand Age (years)
161-231
121-160
81-120
41-80
21-40
3-20
Techniques - Mapping Examples
National efforts – NLCD
National Land Cover Dataset 2011 Tree Canopy Cover
To use FIA survey design and photo-interpretation skills to provide data and analysis
for mapping tree canopy cover across the U.S.
Fig. from Homer et al. 2007
Techniques - Mapping Examples
National efforts – LANDFIRE
LANDscape and FIRE management planning tool
• Support fire and fuels
management planning
• Support budgeting to
evaluate fire management
alternatives
• Provide landscape-scale
products for fire and land
management activities
• Consistent vegetation data
• Supplement strategic and
tactical planning for fire
operations
Techniques - Mapping Examples
Species distribution mapping
Effects of Projected Climate Change on Distribution
Patterns of Western North American Conifers
Collaboration with Utah State University (USU) and Swiss Federal Research Lab (WSL)
Moisen, G.G. RMRS; Edwards, T.C. USU; Zimmermann, N. WSL; Gibson, J. USU, Frescino, T. RMRS
Objectives:
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Climate data.. downscale current and
projected climate variables to 90 m for
Western North America.
Models.. model species distributions using FIA
species presence data as functions of
downscaled climate data.
Analysis.. evaluate projected climate shifts of
species.
and.. investigate leading/trailing edges of
species distributions.
Techniques – Temporal Mapping
North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) project
Mapping tree biomass for the years 2000 to 2006 to characterizing forest
disturbance and re-growth for the North American Carbon Program (NACP) using
Landsat satellite data.
Collaboration with NASA and Univ. of Maryland (UMD)
Moisen, G.G. RMRS; Blackard, J. RMRS; Schleeweis, K. RMRS; Goward, S. UMD, Masek, J. NASA; Cohen, W. PNWRS
2000
2006
Methods
FIA Program – Techniques
Available Resources:
Data:
Nationwide database of ground-based forest inventory data
Categorical variables - forest type, stand-size class, etc..
Continuous variables - crown cover, biomass, basal area, volume, trees per acre, etc..
Library of ancillary digital spatial layers
Satellite imagery – Landsat Thematic Mapper (30m), MODIS (250m), etc..
Satellite-based classified data - cover type maps, canopy cover maps, etc..
Topographic data - digital elevation models (elevation, aspect, slope), etc..
Climate data – past, current, projected-climate data, etc..
Geologic and soil data, etc..
Tools:
Mapping techniques
Spatial interpolation – kriging, inverse distance weighting
Imputation – Nearest neighbor, gradient nearest neighbor, etc.
Regression – Linear models, generalized linear models, classification and regression
trees, etc..
Techniques – Mapping Procedure
Integrate forest
inventory data . .
. .with regionally available
digital data to predict
forest attributes . .
• Satellite imagery
• Digital Elevation Models
• Soils
. .and generate maps of
forest attributes.
y = f(x1 + x2 + xn)
. .using flexible
statistical models and
GIS tools . .
Techniques – Mapping Procedure - GIS
Example:
Tree cover ~ f(TM Band 3 + Elev + Aspect + Slope)
80 TM B3
9200’ Elev
95° Aspect
20% Slope
60 TM B3
8000’ Elev
160° Aspect
15% Slope
120 TM B3
10500’ Elev
10° Aspect
12 % Slope
Landsat TM
Elevation
Aspect
Slope
10 %
cover
35 %
cover
Extract data from
each layer at each
FIA location.
Landsat TM
Elevation
Aspect
Slope
80 %
cover
Prediction
(% Tree crown cover)
Generate spatially explicit maps
of forest attributes based on cell
by cell predictions.
Techniques – Mapping R Tools
ModelMap
An R Package for automating IWFIA’s mapping procedure
Functions for:
Modeling using Random Forests Classification and Regression trees
Applying model across continuous, pixel-based surface.
Accuracy assessment
Techniques – ModelMap
A comprehensive 'package' for use in R programming
language to build models and generate map products.
• Constructs predictive models using Random Forests or
Stochastic Gradient Boosting.
• Validates models using various methods (i.e. independent
data, cross-validation, etc.) with associated graphs and
tables.
• Makes maps by applying model to spatially-explicit
geospatial layers.
• Generates diagnostic plots with 2-way interactions
between predictor variables.