Update underway this year for 5-state region including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.
The Northwest GAP project started in August 2004 and will be mapping the land cover, species distributions, and land stewardship for Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. These data will help with conservation efforts throughout the Northwest.
Sanborn (formerly Space Imaging) in Portland, OR has been contracted to classify imagery from mapping zone 1 (Western Washington). They are working with Natural Heritage biologists to define the ecological systems occurring within this mapping zone.
To date Sanborn staff have developed a final classification scheme using ecological systems. They have acquired numerous ancillary data from various sources including Washington Department of Natural Resources and U.S. Forest Service. They have developed transitional classes for forest clearcuts that indicate what vegetation currently exists within mapped clearcuts. They have obtained copious amounts of training data, which has helped them develop an Olympic National Park prototype.
Olympic National Park has been defined as one of the ecoregions within mapping zone 1, within which CART modeling will be conducted Based on training data obtained from the U.S. Forest Service an initial run of the CART model has been completed for this ecoregion. The results indicated that CART broke out different ecological systems reasonably well. This prototype has helped identify issues that need to be addressed in order to effectively apply the CART modeling approach in the other ecoregions.
Sanborn intends to complete this mapping zone by September 2005.
The Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) has begun to build a species occurrence database. CBI staff have assembled a species list for the Northwest and obtained occurrence as well as ancillary data from numerous sources. At this time, National GAP is exploring avenues for conducting vertebrate modeling over this 5-state region. Since the completion of the individual state projects in the Northwest many modeling innovations have been developed, which may improve our ability to predict species distributions.