GRS Successfully Completes 2021 BLM Central Yukon Project Field Sampling Efforts !
Geographic Resource Solutions completed our 2021 field season in Alaska as planned. Staff were in the field from June 14th - July 10, 2021 and sampled portions of BLM's Central Yukon District's lands in an effort to develop the field data descriptions necessary for GRS to classify and map nearly 5-million acres of BLM lands.
Field crew members convened in Fairbanks, AK on June 13th and departed for Tanana on Monday morning June 14th. Field staff then worked out of Tanana through June 26th before departing for Hughes, sampling vegetation along the way! Field sampling efforts then continued from Hughes through July 10th, when the field crew returned to Fairbanks, again via Wright Air Services. In all, 145 field sites were visited and sampled by field staff resulting in site-specific ecosystems desciptions of both vegetation and abiotic features present at each field site.
Most field sample sites were accessed by boat travel along the Yukon, Tanana, and Koyukuk Rivers and cross-country hiking to the planned site locations. Overnight camping trips were also planned to decrease travel time and expense and increase the number of field sites that were visited. Other sites were accessed by air during 8 days of helicopter travel when field crews are flown from Tanana/Hughes as much as 50 miles out to the field, where they then undertook their field sampling efforts before returning from the field at the end of the day.
GRS staff implemented the line-point transect sampling methodology to develop the species/landscape feature-specific canopy cover estimates; in recent projects GRS has successfully adapted this methodology to also develop forest inventory estimates that include species-specific estimates of trees/acres, height, cubic volume, and biomass (dry tons/acre). All trees, shrubs, herbaceous and non-vascular plants were observed and recorded, as well as landscape features that represented abiotic site features related to the sampled plant communities. Brown's transects were integrated in this sampling approach to estimate counts of both coarse woody debris by decay class and fine woody debris by fuel class. Soil pits were dug and soil survey description data were observed and collected at each field site. GRS has processed the resulting sample area field summary data to develop species-specific estimates of canopy cover, quadratic mean diameter, trees/acre, average height, cubic volume/acre, and biomass (dry tons)/acre representative of each individual field site that was sampled.
These field data presently form a foundation of ground-truth GRS is currently using to develop detailed quantitative natural resource inventory map data sets using GRS's Discrete Classification image processing methodology. These data will eventually be exported to EcoSurvey formats and delivered to BLM Alaska as both EcoSurvey database tables and ArcGIS coverages.
