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This is a collaborative, two-part project to compile and analyze resource data to support WLCI efforts. Part 1 entails directing data synthesis and assessment activities to ensure that they will inform and support the WLCI LPDTs and Coordination Team in their conservation planning efforts, such as developing conservation priorities and strategies, identifying priority areas for conservation actions, evaluating and ranking conservation projects, and evaluating spatial and ecological relations between proposed habitat projects and WLCI priorities. In FY2014, we helped the Coordination Team complete the WLCI Conservation Action Plan and BLM’s annual report, and we provided maps and other materials to assist with ranking...
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Restoration and maintenance of aspen communities is a BLM priority in the Little Mountain Ecosystem, and the USGS has been working with the BLM and the WGFD to monitor aspen stands in that area as part of its WLCI Effectiveness Monitoring work. LANDFIRE and ReGAP maps are considered the best spatial products for representing aspen distribution at regional and landscape scales; however, these products were not designed to support decisions at localized scales, such as that of the Little Mountain Ecosystem. In 2010, this study filled a critical information gap with production of a model (fine-scale map) that delineates aspen distribution for the Little Mountain Ecosystem. To accomplish this, we used classification...
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This data collection is associated with the project: “Status and Trends of Deciduous Communities in the Bighorn Mountains”. It contains the project study area, model evaluation data, model input data, and model output data in the form of probability of occurrence rasters for deciduous and coniferous species, as well as a synthesis map. The aim of the study is to assess the current trends of deciduous communities in the Bighorn National Forest in north-central Wyoming. The data here represents phase I of the project, completed in FY2017. The USGS created a synthesis map of coniferous and deciduous communities in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming using a species distribution modeling approach developed in the Wyoming...
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Since 1990, more than 2 million dollars has been spent on habitat-restoration and enhancement projects in the Little Mountain Ecosystem. Many of these efforts have focused on restoring aspen communities to maintain or improve water quality and to enhance ungulate habitat. During 2009, biologists from the WGFD Green River Regional Office established long-term monitoring plots on Little Mountain to evaluate whether the increased number of ungulates using those stands is in balance with targets set for aspen regeneration. The WGFD is collecting data for developing an index of live to dead trees. The USGS is supporting this effort by measuring stand composition to study herbivory patterns at locations associated with...
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The standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) was summarized for the Upper Green River Basin to quantify climate variability over the last century. The SPEI incorporates both precipitation and temperature data, therefore the index has the capacity to include the effects of temperature variability on drought. The SPEI considers the difference between precipitation and potential evapotranspiration to calculate a climatic water balance at a given time scale (Vicente-Serrano et al. 2010). The number of standard deviations the climatic water balance deviates from the long-term mean for a given time period represents the SPEI for the time period. Here, I calculated the SPEI for each water year (Oct–Sept)...
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