Land cover and land use monitoring: 2016 results for Whiskeytown National Recreation Area

Ives, Jace; Snyder, Allison; Edison, Elizabeth; King, Jacob; Groshong, Lorin; Mohren, Sean

This report summarizes landscape conditions in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in California. Landscape spatial structure resulting from natural processes, and its variation through time, underlies the diversity and integrity of ecosystems. Composition (types and amounts of different land cover), configuration (spatial arrangement of land cover types), and connectivity determine habitat availability, the movements of organisms, and energy and material flow on a landscape. In 2016, the Klamath Network, in partnership with Southern Oregon University, completed and implemented our land cover and land use monitoring protocol (Mohren et al. 2016a). The goal of this monitoring effort is to support National Park Service (NPS) management of natural resources by providing relevant landscape-scale information about ecosystem composition and structure and land use to each of the NPS units in the Klamath Network. The Klamath Network protocol uses methods associated with the NPS NPScape project, which provides information on the status and trends of park natural resources at ecosystem-level and regional scales. We used Geographic Information System (GIS) tools to analyze largely regional- and national-level datasets at three spatial scales for the following landscape indicators: Conservation Status, Land Cover, Landscape Pattern, Housing and Population, Roads, and Disturbance. The three spatial scales are the park boundary (Park), watersheds adjacent to the park boundary (Park-Manager-Selected), and a 30 km buffer around the park boundary (Regional). The number of years available for each dataset varies and is therefore not consistent across all landscape metrics. For some metrics, we present results for multiple years but do not analyze for or discuss change over time; trend analysis will be the subject of future reports. Public land around the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area (hereafter, Whiskeytown) was primarily owned by the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Little of this area was permanently protected from conversion to an unnatural state. About a third of the area had a moderate level of conservation protection that still allows broad, low intensity or localized, high intensity extractive uses. Data were not available for a large portion of the area. In the areas surrounding the park, the most abundant cover type was evergreen forest, followed by shrub/scrub, and herbaceous vegetation. The park itself was also dominated by evergreen forest with some shrub/scrub, mixed forest, and deciduous forest but there was little herbaceous cover. Most cover was categorized as natural, with converted areas primarily in cities and towns. The total amount of impervious surface (e.g., asphalt) was minimal in and around the park. Landscape cover was mostly forest, followed by shrubland, and then grassland. While some forest patches were large and intact, many were thin sections that connected patches, resulting in much of the forest being on the edge of non-forest types. There were some large patches of grassland to the south and southeast of the park. However, much of the grassland was small patches or thin sections connecting larger patches. Largest patches of intact shrubland were southwest of the park, and similar to grassland, much of the area was small patches or thin sections connecting larger patches. In all cover types, the most abundant patch size was small; however, within forest cover, most of the land area was in larger size patches. Whiskeytown was surrounded by housing developments categorized as “rural,” for their low density. The relative proportion of rural housing decreased between 1970 and 2010, coinciding with an increase in exurban, or medium density, housing. Population growth also increased outside the park between 1990 and 2010.

Land cover and land use monitoring: 2016 results for Whiskeytown National Recreation Area

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