Southwestern Region Mid-Scale Existing Vegetation Mapping Project

The Forest Service Southwestern Region is conducting a five-year project to map existing vegetation at the mid-scale level across all Forest Service lands in the region. The project implements an object-oriented approach using image segmentation and various classification methodologies to model vegetation dominance type, canopy cover class, and size class. The FIA sample grid is being used as a basis for accuracy assessment. Modeling is now complete for all Arizona forests as well as the region’s grasslands. Initial results and lessons learned are discussed.