Breaking up your landscape to reach your planning goals
Previously, we’ve explored how you can use Vibrant Planet to -
- assess and segment an analysis area by similar landscape features
- identify features with societal values (SARAs)
- understand how SARAs might respond to disturbances (response functions)
Evaluate your landscape based on your priorities
The next step is to consider your planning goals and objectives. Whether you’re focused on crossboundary planning, specific management areas, or have a predetermined area within the landscape in mind, Vibrant Planet helps you analyze at any scale based on your priorities. The total geographic area under consideration for land treatments is called a planning area.
You can work with our team to upload existing shapefiles that designate your planning area, or we can help you build your own.
Some subsets of your planning area may need to be treated differently – for instance, you may want to consider using Distinct Management Areas (DMAs) within your landscape to:
- Isolate land ownership
- Isolate certain management emphasis areas (such as community protection zones)
- Emphasize different management objectives between DMAs (such as Assets and Safety or Water)
- Restrict management options (remove specific treatment opportunities)
- Restrict certain areas from Planning (remove DMAs from the planning completely)
Other examples of DMAs could include:
- Existing project boundaries for subsequent treatment sequencing, layout and contract preparation
- Threatened, endangered and/or sensitive species protected activity centers/habitat (spotted owl, northern goshawk, sage grouse habitat)
- Special land use designations (inventoried roadless areas, recreation areas, open space, etc)
Science Corner: Overlapping DMAs
Typically, users upload around three to six DMAs at a time and it is common for these DMAs to overlap spatially. When overlap occurs between DMAs, the order that the zipped shapefiles were loaded into Land Tender determines which DMA takes precedence as a distinct management area over another. If overlapping DMAs are loaded in, Land Tender will “prioritize” the first DMA loaded and will remove or clip any portions of overlapping DMAs loaded after. In this instance, “prioritize” means the weightings of the first uploaded DMA will apply to any portions of other overlapping DMAs. Therefore it is generally recommended that more “important” DMA’s be loaded first.