First Season's Progress Report on Vegetation Mapping of Grand Teton National Park

Abstract

The National Park Service and the USGS Biological Resources Division have jointly established a program to map the vegetation in all of the Park Service's units with roughly the same methodology and using the same vegetation classification scheme. Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming has been selected for mapping in 2002 and 2003 as part of this national program. At Grand Teton National Park, the Bureau of Reclamation will interpret aerial photos and map the vegetation. The entities mapped by the Bureau will be related to vegetation types from a classification to be produced by NatureServe, an organization representing natural heritage programs and conservation data centers throughout North and Central America. The data on which the vegetation classification is based will be collected by the staff from the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database, working with National Park Service and NatureServe scientists. In conjunction with the vegetation classification and mapping, Park Service personnel will produce a model to predict fuel loads throughout the Park. The model will predict amounts and types of fuel in the vegetation classification units, and will elucidate the relationship between fuel loads and variables such as slope, aspect, and elevation. Field work for the Grand Teton National Park Vegetation Mapping Project is to be conducted over three summers. The effort in the first two summers will be dedicated to vegetation data collection, and the third summer will be dedicated to on-the-ground accuracy assessment of the preliminary vegetation map created by the photo interpreters.