U.S. Department of the Interior

U.S. Geological Survey

Fact Sheet 2018–3042

August 2018 Printed on recycled paper

Land Treatment Exploration Tool

Learning from the past to improve future restoration and rehabilitation actions

An adaptive management and decision support tool for land treatment exploration and planning.

The tool is available at https://www.usgs.gov/centers/fresc/science/land-treatment-exploration-tool.

Overview

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. Historically, 

treatments were planned on a case by case basis with 

decisions derived from personal experience of past successes 

or failures. Current adaptive management strategies require 

a more structured and robust approach to the planning and 

implementation of land treatments. 

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/).

The Exploration Tool is designed for use by resource 

managers during the land treatment planning stage. This tool 

summarizes environmental characteristics of planned treatment 

areas and facilitates adaptive management practices by 

comparing those characteristics to similar legacy treatments.

Here are the basics of how it works:

1. Upload or draw a planned treatment area via an interactive 

web map.

2. Explore historical land treatments and wildfires that overlap 

with the planned treatment area.

3. Calculate environmental characteristics, such as 

elevation, heat load, ruggedness, land form, soils, average 

precipitation, and average temperature of the planned 

treatment area.

4. Identify and explore details of past treatments that have 

statistically similar climate, heat load, and landform 

characteristics relative to the planned treatment area.

5. Refine the results of the similarity analyses by filtering on a 

variety of treatment characteristics.

6. Create custom reports for use in plans or other documents.

The Land Treatment Exploration Tool provides a practical resource for managers who are planning restoration and rehabilitation actions on 

public lands. The Exploration Tool is a user friendly, web-based interface to Geographic Information System (GIS) maps and tools, and requires 

little to no GIS experience to generate a variety of spatial products. Above is an example of the interactive map where the process begins.
Land Treatment Exploration Tool Features

Planned Treatment Area History and Summary Statistics

The site history of the planned treatment area may inform 

treatment planning. Users can quickly identify the location 

and frequency of past disturbances, such as wildfires and land 

treatments, that have occurred within the planned treatment 

boundary, and export maps displaying these disturbances for use 

in plans and reports.

Users can summarize environmental data from multiple 

spatial layers that overlap their planned treatment area, such as 

elevation, climate, soil moisture and temperature regimes, and 

resistance and resilience classes.

Explore Previous Land Treatment Information

The Land Treatment Exploration Tool brings legacy land treatment information to your desktop by incorporating information from the 

Land Treatment Digital Library (https://ltdl.wr.usgs.gov/) directly into the tool. 

Environmental similarities matter when comparing treatments. The Exploration Tool allows the user to run statistical similarity indices 

(climate, land form, and heat load) to help users identify past treatments that are the most similar to their planned treatment area.

The Exploration Tool provides an array of filters to allow users to narrow their search results to select and research only the most 

appropriate past treatments.

For more information:

Director, Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center

U.S. Geological Survey 

777 NW 9th Street, Corvallis, Oregon 97330 Publishing support provided by the U.S. Geological Survey 

Science Publishing Network, Tacoma Publishing Service Center

ISSN 2327-6932 (online)

https://.doi.org/10.3133/fs20183042

Banner photo credit: Justin Welty 

Authors: D.S. Pilliod, J.L. Welty, M.I. Jeffries, 

L.S. Schueck, and T.J. Zarriello