Every year cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) provides a fine fuel that can ignite and spread fire in shrub steppe environments. Areas where cheatgrass invades experience more frequent fires. However, where cheatgrass exists in a given year is not known until it is encountered in the field, or mapped. Until now, maps estimating cheatgrass extents have not been developed until after a fire season concludes. In this study, we developed an expedited cheatgrass percent cover dataset and map for the Northern Great Basin, two products designed to be available around July 1 of each year. This dataset and map were developed by updating a prior version of a cheatgrass mapping model and are designed to inform land managers and policy makers in near-real-time as they seek to protect grazing allotments and critical wildlife habitat from fire. Producing the expedited cheatgrass percent cover dataset required relatively minor modifications including adjustments to a temporal smoothing process for satellite data, changing start-of-season variables, and substituting an annual summer integration dataset with an 11-year average of summer integration datasets. Comparison of these modified variables to variables used in the previous model revealed strong to very strong results, implying that the 2015 dataset provides a consistent estimate relative to previous datasets. The expedited 2015 cheatgrass percent cover dataset's values range from 0 to 100 with an overall mean value of 9.85, and a standard deviation of 12.78. The areas of highest consistent cheatgrass percent cover occur in the Snake River Plain. We anticipate future expedited cheatgrass percent cover datasets to be downscaled to 30-meter spatial resolution using Landsat satellite data, compared to the current 250-meter resolution based on the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.