NPScape landscape analysis for Mount Rainier National Park: Housing, population, and roads metrics

Grace, Lise; Huff, Mark; Copass, Catharine

In 2009 the Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program of the National Park Service (NPS) funded NPScape, a service-wide inventory of landscape-scale data sets pertaining to all national parks. The I&M Program provided the landscape information from NPScape to nearly 300 parks, covering 6 categories of environmental attributes (metrics) key to conservation planning: 1) population, 2) housing density, 3) roads, 4) land cover, 5) patterns of forest/grassland patches, and 6) conservation status. For this project, we explored the utility of the NPScape data for supplementing the North Coast and Cascade Network’s (NCCN) Landscape Dynamics protocol. Our goal was to: 1) assess the NPScape data for ease of use in analyzing and producing landscape change products (using GIS and provided Python scripts), and 2) provide these products to park managers for use in natural resource conservation. Here we present analyses conducted for Mount Rainier National Park (MORA) on three of the NPScape categories: roads, population, and housing. We used the default Area of Analysis (AOA) for NPScape products, a 30km buffer around the Park as it seemed reasonable to describe landscape-scale drivers that may impact Park natural resources. The housing metrics we selected were historic, current, and projected housing density by decade, 1970-2100, using the modeled data from the Spatially Explicit Regional Growth Model (SERGoM). Housing density was calculated for the 14 density classes identified in the SERGoM data set, then lumped into 7 categories: Private undeveloped, Rural, Exurban, Suburban, Urban, Commercial/industrial, and Urban-regional park. There was a general trend, over the 1970-2100 time period, towards increasing density in the exurban, suburban, and urban categories, decreasing density in the private undeveloped and rural categories, and no change in the commercial/industrial or urban-regional park classes. The population metrics selected were total population and population density by Census block group for 1990, 2000, and 2010. Waterbodies, protected areas, and the park itself, do not have people living in them and were excluded from the analyses. Both total population and population density increased dramatically (61 and 64%, respectively) over the 1990-2010 time period. The roads metrics selected were density of all roads, distance from all roads, and area without roads (>500 m from all roads). The NPScape roads metrics produced by the national I&M program were calculated using ESRI’s national roads data set. This data set was of variable accuracy for NCCN parks, so we calculated the road metrics using the Bureau of Land Management data set. All metrics selected for our project were calculated for the entire MORA AOA. Density of all roads and area without roads were also analyzed for the area within the Park boundary for comparison to the larger AOA. Road density was dramatically lower within the Park and in other protected areas than in the rest of the AOA. The distance from roads was much greater within the Park boundary as well as in the areas directly east and southeast of the Park (USFS wilderness areas) as compared to other areas in the AOA, which include the greater Seattle and Tacoma regions and privately owned timber lands. Area without roads as a percentage of total area within the Park boundary and the entire AOA showed that the Park had a significantly larger proportion of roadless area (84.7) than the AOA (36.2).

NPScape landscape analysis for Mount Rainier National Park: Housing, population, and roads metrics

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