Developing Tools and Education Materials for Implementing the National Vegetation Classification

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The principle purpose of this agreement is to make the National Vegetation Classification (NVC) available and usable by anyone in the US. This proposal seeks a partner for development and peer review of classification and mapping products for publicly available programs like LANDFIRE, NatureServe Explorer and VegPlot. Products produced in this proposal can provide increased accuracy of information and facilitate use of the NVC by both public and private land managers. The tools in development can be used for interagency implementation of the NVC through the FGDC Vegetation subcommittee. Both public and private land managers are actively engaged in inventory and monitoring vegetation resources across the nation. The common language provided by the NVC increases the return on those individual investments in this survey work and allows all to be more efficient and share information widely to increase our understanding of the nation’s vegetation resource. Having one vegetation language benefits the public and increases their s ability to understand what the vegetation is in an area of concern to them and increases understanding of how it is changing over time. The BLM benefits by having more accurate and standardized data on public lands that correlates with vegetation outside our jurisdictional boundaries for a landscape or watershed scale view of the condition of vegetation.

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