The US Forest Service contracted with Watershed Sciences to provide LiDAR data collection
for the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest located within the Willamette National Forest,
consisting of approximately 16,700 acres in Lane and Linn Counties, Oregon.
The data were collected on August 10th and 11th, 2008.

Deliverable from the contractor included raw point cloud data, 1 meter bare-earth
and highest hits DEMs. A vegetation layer was produced by subtracting the bare-earth
DEM from the highest hits DEM.

The conversion of agricultural and rural lands for development purposes reflects one of the greatest threats to key ecosystem services in the United States. This poster addresses land use change dynamics in southern Florida, linking them to local governance-zoning institutions. Study of land use and zoning patterns informs broader questions of relevance to the LTER, including: “What is the pattern of land and water use change in urban and working systems: what are the temporal and spatial patterns of human activity and ecosystem dynamics in LTER regions?

Despite the increased recognition of the importance of urban sprawl and landscape fragmentation on social-ecological systems, comparative research on cities across the United States is limited. Therefore, we developed a cross-site comparative study on the land spatial pattern across five LTER sites in the US Southwest. This poster examines the land pattern characteristics for an individual site - Central Arizona Phoenix (CAP).

Over the past few years, several LTER-wide projects have created web services to easily find, access and compare long-term ecological datasets (e.g., EcoTrends*) and spatial datasets (e.g., LTER Spatial Data Workbench/CREATE**) across the LTER network; however, temporal and spatial datasets are often stored separately and accessed from different websites. Integrating long-term data and map layers from across the LTER network in a single website could be the next step in improving access to LTER’s rich legacy of both temporal and spatial data.

Land uses and management practices in residential parcels (e.g., aesthetic/recreational/economic uses, land-cover choices, irrigation and chemical applications) impact and are impacted by social (e.g., stratification and status, environmental perceptions, zoning) and ecological (e.g., carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, water demand and quality) processes.

The Southwest is the incubator of the country’s fastest growing urban landscapes; relatively young socio-ecosystems of known origins but unknown fates. The region has long-served as a destination for the American dream of the fresh start, the new land; sunlit places far from East Coast stoicism and West Coast angst. Ironically, Thomas Jefferson’s humid zone ideal of an eternally expanding fee simple empire remains most robustly in force and uncontradicted in the deserts of the Southwest. Las Cruces, New Mexico is no exception.

Appropriate quantification of the spatial distribution of lead (Pb) in urban soils requires an understanding of the influence that individual landscape features have on soil Pb concentrations as well as the importance of the larger landscape context. In order to examine patterns of residential soil Pb concentrations we employed a sampling scheme that addressed both landscape context and individual landscape features predicted to affect Pb retention. The larger landscape context was considered by examining the distance to major road networks and housing age.

This workshop will introduce Virtual Field Trips version 2. We will explore developing an open access library of on-line, interactive virtual field trips for sites within the LTER Network. Individual field trips include site descriptions with links to data sources and on-line explorer tools, panoramic movies with hotspots linking to visual and audio descriptions of points of interest (teaching points), photo galleries that further describe key site features, and more.

This working group is a continuation of the previous day's meeting, here to plan the future course of actions.

Increasing land fragmentation, mostly caused by urban sprawl and “leap-frog’ developments, is a major concern in many rapidly growing metropolitan cities of the US. Land fragmentation affects biodiversity and ecosystem processes, as portions of the landscape become isolated without connecting corridors and this, in turn, can change ecological structure and function. This cross-site comparative study, a joint-collaboration of several LTER sites (i.e.