Water Resources Professional Project Reports

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

Summer 2019

Abstract

Ecological restoration assists the recovery of degraded ecosystems by returning their structure, processes, and functions to within their natural range of variation, improving long term sustainability and resilience. The United States Forest Service has sought to increase the pace and scale of restoration treatments on lands that it manages in order to continue to provide important ecosystem services including timber production, fish and wildlife habitat, grazing, watershed protection, and recreation. The Agency developed two classification systems to identify restoration need on Forest Service managed lands, the Watershed Condition Classification (WCC) and the Terrestrial Condition Assessment (TCA). These two classification systems could potentially be integrated or used concurrently in the future. This work is a first step in working with the two classifications together. Using GIS software, I completed an overlay analysis of the two classification systems to quantify Forest Service lands where both systems identified restoration need or where only one classification system identified restoration need. There was wide scale agreement between the WCC and TCA on areas that do not need restoration. Areas where the two classification systems both identify restoration need were relatively small, making up only 1% of all National Forest System lands. These results provide a first step in possible integration of these two classification systems to help prioritize restoration actions on Forest Service lands.

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