USGS Land Treatment Exploration Tool: Learning from Past Restoration

Land managers make decisions about restoration and rehabilitation that shape landscapes and ecosystems — often through soil and vegetation manipulations called land treatments. Those were once planned case by case, from personal experience of past successes and failures. Adaptive management calls for something more structured.

The tool

The U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Land Management built the Land Treatment Exploration Tool (usgs.gov/ltet) for managers planning treatments on public lands. It draws on records of past treatments in the Land Treatment Digital Library (LTDL), and needs little or no GIS experience.

How it works

1. Upload or draw a planned treatment area on an interactive web map.
2. Explore land treatments, wildfires and monitoring data that overlap it.
3. Calculate its environmental characteristics: vegetation, heat load, ruggedness, soils, average climate and drought.
4. Find past treatments with statistically similar climate, heat load and landform.
5. Filter the matches by treatment characteristics.
6. Create reports for plans and other documents.

Site history

A planned area's history can guide the plan. Users can see where and how often wildfires and past treatments have hit the area, and export maps of them.

Learning from past treatments

• Legacy records: the LTDL's information comes straight into the tool.
• Like with like: similarity indices for climate, landform and heat load find the past treatments most comparable to the new site.
• Filters narrow the results to the most relevant treatments.
• Summaries: users can summarize overlapping data layers — monitoring, vegetation, elevation, climate, soil moisture and temperature regimes, and resistance and resilience classes.

Sources

Based on Land Treatment Exploration Tool, by D.S. Pilliod, J.L. Welty, M.I. Jeffries, L.S. Schueck and T.J. Zarriello, USGS Fact Sheet 2018–3042 (version 1.3, March 2023), Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey (DOI); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The fact sheet's screenshots, drawn on commercial basemaps, are left out.