State Reports - Kentucky The Kentucky Gap Analysis Project (A Landscape Assessment of Kentucky’s Biodiversity) is officially under way as of June 1, 1997, when the Cooperative Agreement with the USGS was formalized. The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, lead agency for KY-GAP, and Murray State University signed a Memorandum of Agreement to begin the vegetation portion of the project. Interviews have been held to fill two positions, Vegetation Ecologist and Image Analyst. Air video data, collected in the fall of 1996, has been built into coverages and duplicated. A spatial data set of geology (1:500,000) has been acquired and will be used as a mask for image analysis. Ground-truthing is under way at several sites in the state: Pennyrile State Park, Fort Campbell, Land Between the Lakes, and Westvaco Timberlands. Agreements are being arranged with several state agencies to combine property boundary information and conservation status into a single conservation lands data set. As outlined in the workplan, the vertebrate portion of KY-GAP will not be officially started until the project’s second year. However, the Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Information System (KFWIS) staff have begun to organize archived data into appropriate sets for spatial data set creation. |