Land cover and land use monitoring: 2016 results for Redwood National and State Parks

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

This report summarizes landscape conditions in Redwood National and State Parks. 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), a 100-mile park buffer with watershed and subbasin boundaries (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. and then grassland. Forest patches were large and intact. Little grassland occurred in the study area. While there were some large patches to the southwest of the Park, much of the grassland was small patches. Little shrubland occurred in the study area, and similar to grassland, much of the area was small patches or thin sections connecting patches. In all cover types, small patches were the most abundant; however, within forest cover, most of the land area was in larger size patches. The study area contained few housing developments, with most categorized as “rural”, for their low density. The relative proportion of rural housing decreased slightly between 1970 and 2010, coinciding with a slight increase in exurban, or medium density, housing. Population outside the Park was relatively low but increased between 1990 and 2010. While numerous roads existed throughout the study area, Crater Lake NP and the adjacent national forest to the north and south contained the areas that were furthest from any roads. Similarly, the largest sections of land without roads were in these same areas. There was little change in the amount of roads between 2010 and 2015. Wildfire was the dominant disturbance between 1999 and 2012 in and around the Park. In areas outside the Park, tree harvesting also occurred.

Land cover and land use monitoring: 2016 results for Redwood National and State Parks

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