GSR_044 Land Treatment Exploration Tool

The Land Treatment Exploration Tool, developed by the USGS with the Bureau of Land Management, aims to provide resource managers with a structured approach for treatment planning. The Exploration Tool assembles dozens of spatial layers and taps into various resources to provide a consistent and comprehensive Site Characterization Report and Drought Forecast Report to help guide successful restoration outcomes. The Exploration Tool also displays results from the USFWS Information and Planning Consultation Tool (IPaC) for the planned treatment area. The website was recently updated to include many improvements and new features. The main new feature is the Seasonal Drought Forecast Tool. The new Drought Tool forecasts seasonal weather and soil water availability for the upcoming year to help plan treatments. Also included are predicted establishment metrics for sagebrush seedlings. Each year, public 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. Land treatments include activities such as removal or alteration of plant biomass, seeding burned areas, and herbicide applications. These treatments were historically planned on a case by case basis with decisions about implementation approaches, methods, and operations derived from personal experience of past successes or failures. Modern adaptive management strategies strive to capture this local knowledge through time, both locally and regionally. In 2017, 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/), a catalog of information about all known treatments on public lands administered by the BLM in the Western United States. The Exploration Tool is designed for resource managers to use when planning land treatments. The tool provides useful summaries of environmental characteristics of planned treatment areas and facilitates adaptive management practices by comparing those characteristics to other similar treatments within a specified distance or area of interest.