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Land Treatment Exploration Tool
Upload a shapefile:
or Draw a treatment boundary:
Need to edit your treatment area on the map? Click on it and move the vertices. You will not be able to identify features under your proposed treatment while at this step.
Download the proposed treatment polygon as:
Toggle the options in the Site History tab to view treatment, wildfire, climate, and recent drought history. Historical climate is viewable as the 30 year (1980 - 2010) averages displayed as a climatogram.
Look up on-the-ground monitoring in the Monitoring tab.
Preview endangered species, migratory birds, facilities, and wetlands information for your area through the IPaC tab.
View overlays of the numerous layers available on the Planning Map.
View future drought forecasts for temperature, precipitation and soil moisture on the Drought Forecast tab.
Go back to Step 2 to adjust your planned treatment boundary, if necessary.
How do you want to search for treatments?
To search for matching LTDL treatments spatially, first select a buffer distance, political boundary, or ecological boundary from the list below. Political and ecological boundaries are automatically determined by the location of your proposed treatment. If two or more boundaries overlap your treatment, all overlapping boundaries will be utilized in the treatment search. Next, you have the option of running a similarity calculation that statistically compares and ranks the similarity of your proposed treatment to those in the LTDL based upon climate, heat load, or landform. Similarity calculations will take several minutes to run as the process is done on the fly, so be patient. However, running all three calculations at once will not increase processing time because they are run independently and in parallel. Once you have selected a buffer or boundary and select the optional similarity calculations you wish to run, the 'Query the LTDL' button will appear at the bottom of Step 4. Click this button to start the query and proceed to Step 5. The query status will be updated as text messages in the 'Query status' section at the bottom on Step 4.
While this processes, explore the Site History for your proposed treatment area.
Select the layers to view on the map. After clicking this, you will see the legend and a tab to change the opacity of the layer. If a layer is currently grayed out, you are outside the visibility scale. Zoom in and the layer will become active.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) program monitors the status, condition, and trend of national BLM resources in accordance with BLM polices. The AIM Strategy - a standardized monitoring strategy for assessing natural resource condition and trend on BLM public lands, specifies a probabilistic sampling design, standard core indicators and methods, electronic data capture and management, and integration of on-the-ground collected field data with remotely sensed data. All data collection and management are carried out by BLM Field Offices, BLM Districts, and/or affiliated field crews with support from the BLM National Operations Center. Data are stored in a centralized database (TerrADat, BLM AIM Lotic Database) at the BLM National Operations Center and available at https://gbp-blm-egis.hub.arcgis.com/pages/aim.
This tab identifies monitoring points within and near the proposed treatment polygon. Refine the search distance by typing a distance - in miles, in the box below. The map will display the proposed treatment, the search area, and the monitoring points. The tables under the map display the monitoring point data within and near the polygon. Click a row to highlight the monitoring point in the map. Check the box for a row to add the selected monitoring point data to the Site Characterization Report. Click a species code - the black ovals with white lettering, to view information on that species in the USDA plants database.
| Treatment ID | Treatment Type | Project | % Overlap |
|---|
Below, we provide a map of one of the most useful drought indices for translating meteorological drought into an index that is able to represent moisture in ecosystems, known as SPEI, the Standardized Precipitation Drought Index (Vicente Serrano et al. 2010), which is useful in assessing how "drought" prone site(s) of interest are based on long-term climate and tendency for the site to have annual deviations from climate. Several drought indices are available, but SPEI has become more widely used in settings such as the western US because the index incorporates temperature through basic calculation of precipitation minus potential evapotranspiration, and furthermore has been standardized using more complex calculations to make the index scalable for different applications (from the site to continent). SPEI values should be zero in the long term, unless directional change in moisture availability is occurring across the specified time range. SPEI typically range from approximately +2 to -2 for substantive wet and dry periods, respectively, and up to +4 and -4 for extreme wet or dry periods.
For the most recent SPEI Drought Map, see the SPEI Global Drought Monitor .
| Similarity to LTDL Treatment | Treatment Evaluation | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Climate Rank (Value) | Heat Load Rank (Value) | Landform Rank (Value) | Project | Treatment Category | Treatment Type | Year | endyr | Imp | Poly | SL | Res | Mon | Ver | Prj_ID | Trt_ID | Prj_Name | TrtID | Plan_Imp | Success | Dates_Confirmed | Init_Date | Comp_Date | Units | Num_Units | Trt_Type_Sub | Seed_List | Objectives | Treatment_Effect_and_Results | Trt_Feature_Type | Feature_Status | Total_Acres | Field_Office | State | Doc_Plan | Doc_Report | Doc_Monitoring | Doc_Trt_Paper_Map | Doc_Photos | Doc_Seed_List_Exists | Treatment_Seeded | Seed_List_Confirmed | Actual_Implementation | Purpose | Seed | |||
| Treatment Evaluation | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Climate Rank (Value) | Heat Load Rank (Value) | Landform Rank (Value) | Project | Treatment Category | Treatment Type | Year | Imp | Poly | SL | Res | Mon | Ver | |||
The USFWS Information for Planning and Consultation Project (IPaC) tool was developed by the USFWS to streamline their environmental review process. IPaC helps to identify listed species, critical habitat, migratory birds or other natural resources that may be affected by a proposed project.
After the treatment boundary is created and at Step 3 – Explore site characteristics, some of the information available from the IPaC tool will be displayed below. A unique URL to an individual IPaC project will be generated for each project created using the LTET. If you want to log in and explore the full capabilities of the IPaC tool, go to (waiting for URL)
The first section below includes listed species that may be affected by the proposed project. IPaC provides the LTET with a list of species that are endangered, threatened, candidate, or proposed for listing. The LTET adds information on the status, description, where they are found, and a link to each Environmental Conservation Online System (ECOS) species profile. The second section below is a list of USFWS Birds of Conservation Concern or other vulnerable bird species. Data are provided from the Avian Knowledge Network data store and are additional species that may warrant attention in the proposed project area. The last section below shows data from the National Wetlands Inventory, including an interactive map, data table(s), and definitions.
Access their Frequently Asked Questions here: https://ecos.fws.gov/ipac/#faq
Weather variability is well known to have strong effects on land treatment application and outcomes particularly in dryland ecosystems. Intra-annual variations in seasonal water and temperature is especially important, such as those driven by particular storms or short-term events that last weeks or months. Past research has demonstrated the importance of weather, and drought in particular, on the success or failure of dryland restoration (e.g. Brabec et al. 2017; Hardegree et al. 2018, Shriver et al. 2018, Moffett et al. 2019).
This tool forecasts seasonal weather and soil water availability to help plan treatments such as herbicide or seeding after wildfires. The forecasts may help in understanding past treatment results, and/or evaluate climate and weather effects on treatments.
The Seasonal Ecological Drought Forecast Tool estimates soil moisture conditions for 12 months into the future by integrating National Weather Service regional seasonal temperature and precipitation forecasts, including uncertainty, with an ecosystem water balance model. Users select a point location and can specify soil texture or use gridded soils data SSURGO and STATSGO. The Seasonal Ecological Drought Forecast tool generates site-specific temperature, precipitation and soil moisture forecasts and compares forecasted conditions to historical conditions at 4km resolution. These forecasts can help assess the potential impact of drought on land treatments in the next 12 months. The Seasonal Ecological Drought Forecast tool also forecasts sagebrush establishment success for the coming season. Metrics for additional plant species are planned for future versions of the tool.
The latitude and longitude shown in the map box to the left represents a central point for the planned treatment boundary created in Step 2. The point can be changed by clicking on the 'Point' button below the map to clear the current selection and clicking a new point on the map. The Seasonal Ecological Drought Forecast tool is set by default to use gridded soils data to determine the percent clay and sand for the location. Click the 'Specify Soils' radio button to show fields to specify values for the percent clay and sand. Click the 'Calculate' button when location and soils selections are complete. It may take 3-5 minutes for the Seasonal Ecological Drought Forecast tool to return a report. The results will display below and consist of a summary, shown first, and overview graphs of soil moisture, air temperature, and precipitation. Clicking the section headers opens detailed sections for each metric. See the User Guide Drought Forecast tab for more detailed instructions on how to use this tool and interpret its results.
| Attribute | Value |
|---|
