LANDFIRE Potential Vegetation Products: Methods and Applications

LANDFIRE is a five-year, multi-partner project chartered to generate consistent, comprehensive maps and data describing vegetation, wildland fuel, and fire characteristics across the United States. While much of the attention on LANDFIRE data products has focused on their application to fire management, this presentation will address the data layers representing potential vegetation and how they may be useful to a broader natural resource management audience. LANDFIRE produces two 30-meter raster geospatial layers that depict slightly different concepts of potential natural vegetation, Environmental Site Potential (ESP), and Biophysical Settings (BpS). Possible applications of these layers include restoration of native ecosystems, and analysis of habitat suitability for wildlife and plant species. In this presentation, I will discuss the ESP and BpS concepts, provide an overview of methods used to map them, highlight some examples of how they have been used to date, and invite field users to test the value of these layers in addressing resource management and ecological questions.