Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area Landscape Context

Daley, Rob; Kinseth, Michelle; Legg, Kristin; Monahan, William; Nelson, Lisa; Philippi, Tom; Story, Mike

doi:10.57830/2306079

Extending north into Montana and south into Wyoming between the Pryor and Bighorn mountains, the landscapes of Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area (BICA) brim with natural and cultural history and resources. The National Park Service (NPS) administers BICA to provide for public outdoor recreation and to preserve scenic, scientific, and historic features. Managing BICA entails following NPS management policies and interacting extensively with other federal, state, tribal, and private jurisdictions and interests within, overlapping, and adjacent to the National Recreation Area. Since many National Park Service units share the need to monitor landscapes, the NPS Inventory and Monitoring Division initiated a service-wide program called NPScape in 2010 to assemble data, develop tools, and provide support for evaluating and reporting on landscape characteristics and changes that extend beyond park boundaries. NPScape data were used to help determine whether an impact would harm the integrity of BICA’s natural landscapes, including opportunities to enjoy those natural landscapes, by quantifying and documenting landscape characteristics in a reliable, repeatable, and comparable way over time. The study area within a 30-kilometer buffer around and including BICA’s managed lands represents the landscape for reporting on housing, population, roads, land cover, conservation status, and climate. The data within this project were analyzed to create the report Daley R, Kinseth M, Legg K, Monahan WB. 2015. Landscape context of Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. Natural Resource Report. NPS/GRYN/NRR—2015/995. National Park Service. Fort Collins, Colorado.

Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area Landscape Context

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