USGS Land Treatment Digital Library Data Release: A centralized archive for land treatment tabular and spatial data (ver. 7.0, September 2024)

Across the country, public land managers make hundreds of decisions each year that influence landscapes and ecosystems within the lands they manage. Many of these decisions involve vegetation manipulations known as land treatments. Land treatments include activities such as removal or alteration of plant biomass, seeding burned areas, and herbicide applications. Data on these land treatments historically have been stored at local offices and gathering information across large spatial areas was difficult. These valuable data needed to be centralized and stored for Federal agencies involved in land treatments because these data are useful to land managers for policy and management and to scientists for developing sampling designs and studies. In 2008, the Land Treatment Digital Library (LTDL) was created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to catalog information about land treatments on federal lands in the western United States. The flexible framework of the library allows for the storage of a wide variety of data in different formats. The library contains data in text, tabular, spatial, and image formats. Specific examples include project plans and implementation reports, monitoring data, spatial data files from geographic information systems, digitized paper maps, and digital images of land treatments. The data are entered by USGS employees and are accessible through a searchable website. The LTDL can be used to respond to information requests, conduct analyses and other forms of information syntheses, produce maps, and generate reports for federal managers, scientists, and other authorized users. This data release includes the most up to date data available in the LTDL at the time of release. However, most field offices were last visited to collect their comprehensive treatment data between 2011-2014. Users should be aware that while treatments may exist in some field offices past the date of last collection, it is not a comprehensive representation of land treatments that have occurred on BLM lands during the most recent time span. Offices in southern Idaho and eastern Oregon were revisited in the winter of 2019 and the data collected during those visits are available in this release. Offices in northern Nevada were visited in 2023 and the data collected during those visits are available in this release. Several offices in southern Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming were visited in 2024, and some of the data collected during those visits are available in this release. All available post wildfire emergency stabilization and rehabilitation treatments are included for fires up to 2023.

Tags: arizona, biological-informatics, biota, california, colorado, data-management, data-preservation, database-administration, digitization, ecosystem-management, environment, geospatial-datasets, idaho, information-technology-methods, interagency-programs, map-interfaces, montana, natural-resource-management, nevada, new-mexico, north-america, north-dakota, oregon, reintroduction-organisms, remediation, shrubland-ecosystems, south-dakota, texas, united-states, usgs-66a3cf1dd34ef465b882210f, utah, washington, web-interface-development, wyoming
Organization: Department of the Interior