NW High Desert: The Landscape Toolbox
The Idaho Chapter of The Nature Conservancy is working with both public and private land management partners to develop a set of analytical and monitoring tools, the Landscape Toolbox, which are designed to enable better rangeland management at landscape scales by integrating existing and emerging field, remote sensing, and landscape scenario modeling methods for rangeland assessment, monitoring, and planning.
Protecting or improving rangeland condition requires comprehensive landscape management strategies. Land managers have embraced a landscape-scale philosophy and new methods are being developed to provide information to planners and managers such as satellite imagery to assess current conditions and detect changes, and predictive models to forecast change. Unfortunately, there is currently no coordinated system for integrating these new approaches with existing management methods.
A key strength of the Landscape Toolbox is its ability to integrate information gathered at multiple scales, ranging from site specific ground-based surveys to large-scale remote sensing methods. By merging these different types of data into a single analytical framework, the toolbox provides an objective, measureable, repeatable, and efficient system that managers can use to analyze sagebrush ecosystems.
At its foundation, the Landscape Toolbox has two basic premises. First, most management questions can be asked at more than one scale, and second, any method or technology has a range of scales over which it can provide meaningful information to answer management questions. Thus the best results will come from matching management questions to a mix of technologies and methods based on the scale of the question. The goal of the Landscape Toolbox project is to show how, by organizing management questions and information by scale using the Landscape Toolbox Products described below, different methods and technologies can be used together to answer questions at different scales.
