Land treatment exploration tool

Overview

Land managers make decisions regarding restoration and rehabilitation actions that influence landscapes and ecosystems. Many of these decisions involve soil and vegetation manipulations, often known as land treatments. Historically, treatments were planned on a case by case basis with decisions derived from personal experience of past successes or failures. Current adaptive management strategies require a more structured and robust approach to the planning and implementation of land treatments.

The U.S. Geological Survey partnered with the Bureau of Land Management to create the Land Treatment Exploration Tool to facilitate adaptive management of land treatments. The Exploration Tool taps into a wealth of information about past treatments in the Land Treatment Digital Library (LTDL, https://ltdl.wr.usgs.gov/).

The Exploration Tool is designed for use by resource managers during the land treatment planning stage. This tool summarizes environmental characteristics of planned treatment areas and facilitates adaptive management practices by comparing those characteristics to similar legacy treatments.