State Reports - Oklahoma It has been a productive year for the Oklahoma Gap Analysis Project (OK-GAP). Dr. Xiandong Meng from the University of Maine joined the OK-GAP team and is working on the land cover layer with Mark Gregory and Holly Hovis, a botany graduate student at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Mark Lomolino, Ian Butler, Dan Hough, and zoology graduate student Dave Perault of the Oklahoma Biological Survey and University of Oklahoma have continued to make significant progress on the vertebrate animal distribution and land stewardship layers. At present, we seem to be on target for project completion by the end of 1998. Thematic Mapper (TM) scenes for southern Oklahoma have been classified using Spectrum software and videography data. Our protocol is to classify video images along flight lines through each TM scene and use these data to perform a preliminary classification of the scene. Random and problematic points classified on the scenes are being verified by a field team. In addition, we are also organizing a group of cooperators to classify vegetation throughout the state for use in assessing the accuracy of the vegetation map. Geographic range maps of all 427 vertebrate species have been mapped, verified, and digitized. Habitat associations have been encoded for all species, and locational databases have been compiled. Vertebrate-vegetation association models have been developed for all species and are being tested using a previous vegetative land cover map of Oklahoma. The land stewardship map has been completed. Work continues on verifying the stewardship status for each tract of land that is under some management regime. Cooperators continue to play an important role in OK-GAP. Experts from around the state have been enlisted to verify maps from all three layers. We look to involve them further in the coming months as we begin to generate additional map products. |