Get reliable rangeland science

Field inventories are a fundamental component of most science-based approaches to ecological site classification and description. The high cost of field sampling, however, coupled with budgetary and workforce constraints, means that field datasets are often not as comprehensive or statistically rigorous as might be desired. We describe the use of two alternative data sources to support ecological site classification in the Central Rocky Mountains Major Land Resource Area. The first resource was a field dataset previously collected during a terrestrial ecological unit inventory (TEUI) of the Beartooth Mountains. The second resource was high resolution satellite imagery offered through the ArcGIS Online World Imagery map service, which we used to manually attribute a sample of randomly located points. Both datasets were employed to study abiotic factors influencing the distribution of two locally important vegetation types: big sagebrush shrubland and plant communities dominated by introduced perennial grasses. TEUI field data enabled us to study edaphic effects on vegetation patterns without conducting an extensive ecological inventory ourselves. Image interpretation points provided a larger and more statistically rigorous sample useful for studying broad-scale relationships between target vegetation types, climate, and landform. We found these two datasets to be complementary, each providing unique types of information and together affording insights that neither could alone. Alternative data sources such as those employed here are likely to be increasingly utilized in ecological site classification and description as collaboration among interested parties grows and new datasets become available.