Geospatial Analysis and Photo Interpretation

Malheur National Forest Vegetation Mapping

The Malheur National Forest Supervisor's Office initiated a project to quantify and describe the vegetation within the entire ~1.8 million acre boundaries of the Malheur National Forest using aerial photography. The purpose of this project was to determine the structure and composition of both forested and non-forested stands for use in Forest planning at the watershed and larger scales, including ecosystem analysis at the watershed scale, forest health analyses, wildland fire risk assessments, project planning,and broad-scale vegetation assessments.

A hierarchy of potential vegetation types was identified for the Blue Mountain Province that categorize vegetation into 297 fine-scale descriptive plant associations, or Ecoclasses. Each ecoclass was aggregated into a larger, mid-scale plant association group (PAG) based upon their commonality of temperature and moisture regimes. In turn, each PAG was grouped into potential vegetation groups (PVG) that coarsely describe the ecologically controlling factors influencing vegetation (e.g., dry upland forest, etc.)