Bureau of Land Management Utah Statewide FORVIS Inventory 2008

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was mandated in 2005 to inventory their forest resources, and enter the data into a national database called FORVIS. Individual states were given the latitude to complete the inventory in a manner of their choice. Utah BLM manages nearly 23 million acres of land, roughly 42 percent of the State. With only two full-time foresters and funding to hire four field positions for summer data gathering, completing this inventory seemed like an overwhelming task. BLM elected to use remote sensing techniques to accomplish this daunting requirement. Th rough the imaging processing software eCognition, a pilot project was initiated in Cedar City in Southwestern Utah. Using 1-m natural color imagery, Landsat, various derived indices, and elevation data, a segmentation was created in eCognition, then exported into ArcMap, where fi eld sites were selected and data gathered. Once field data was available, 80% of the sites were used to perform a supervised classification in eCognition; the remaining 20% of the sites were used to verify the accuracy of the initial classification. Overall, based on this test, accuracy levels averaged around 80%. Encouraged, the image area was expanded and the classification run again; also with good results. Pleased with the results obtained so far, Utah BLM is now mosaicking the 2006 CIR NAIP imagery for the rest of the state in 100K-quad format and creating field site locations for the coming summer’s field crew to visit. Inventory of 1 million acres each year is the current goal.