The Northeast Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to field test the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)'s Vegetation Standard at the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, to evaluate this vegetation standard to see how useful it is for refuge applications. Their most recent information on this project follows.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has no single standard for classifying or mapping vegetation. Current vegetation mapping efforts use a combined system of Society of American Foresters (forest types), National Wetland Inventory (wetland types), Anderson (open and developed land types), or GAP/TNC (coarse terrestrial vegetation types). A project to demonstrate the usefulness of The Nature Conservancy's vegetation classification system (which was initially modified from UNESCO's system and then further developed in cooperation with the Ecological Society of America, GAP Analysis, academics, researchers, etc.) was initially proposed a few years back. At one point there was hope that we could partner with the National Park Service/National Biological Service project to map vegetation in the National Parklands. That partnership fell through, but funds were transferred to the Gap Analysis program to be able to "contract" with TNC to do the work.
The refuge envisions numerous applications for the vegetation information including improving management of their shorebirds, endangered species, invasive weeds, and ponies. A small project is currently being designed that would allow refuge staff to evaluate how well breeding bird habitat can be represented with a detailed vegetation data layer. Beyond Chincoteague, we hope to demonstrate that knowledge about vegetation communities throughout the National Wildlife Refuge System will help the FWS manage the system more effectively.
In the meantime, the Federal Geographic Data Committee vegetation subcommittee was prompted to revamp the then-current draft vegetation standard to more closely align with TNC's efforts. Since then, TNC's chief ecologist has been an integral part of the subcommittee and the ESA representative has also made significant contributions to the draft standard. So the Chincoteague pilot project has evolved into a test of essentially the FGDC's draft vegetation standard.
There was an initial delay in the project because new aerial photography had to be taken of the refuge. Then, after an incredible delay in sorting out the funding issues, and after an extraordinary delay in locating and obtaining SPOT images, Paul Steblein finally obtained the images from Jeff Waldon of Fish and Wildlife Information Exchange at Virginia Tech. Paul then processed the data and sent the tape to TNC. TNC then forwarded it to AIS (the same company doing the photo interpretation for the NPS/NBS project) who has rectified the vegetation polygons from the aerial photography to the SPOT basemap. AIS has sent this information to TNC where a meeting was held on May 15 to develop the sampling design for the field work. The field work is currently scheduled for mid-August. This is when the Virginia Natural Heritage Program staff will be able to do this work.
Final products will include:
For additional information regarding this Web page, contact Paul Steblein, the Northeast Region's GIS coordinator, at Paul_Steblein@fws.gov
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Last Modified January 02, 2001 03:15 PM