Mapping Every Meadow: New Vegetation Maps for Mount Rainier, North Cascades and Olympic

Mapping what grows across 1,832,487 acres of mountains is not done in a season. The North Coast and Cascades Network (NCCN) started in 2005, and with the Institute for Natural Resources at Portland State University it has now finished classifying, describing and mapping the plant communities of Mount Rainier, North Cascades and Olympic national parks — just over 15 years in the making.

Vegetation mapping crew lead Matt Lee records data in a subalpine meadow in North Cascades National Park. Credit: NPS.

Why map vegetation

The three parks cover over 741,436 hectares, from sea level at Olympic to 14,410 feet on Mount Rainier, so their vegetation is enormously varied. A map of it:

• shows where each plant community is, how much there is and in what pattern;
• feeds wildlife monitoring, tracking climate change in unusual habitats, and predicting the effects of wildland fire;
• sets a baseline for measuring change in the parks over time, and for comparing them with unprotected land.

The project is part of the NPS Vegetation Mapping Inventory, which is mapping over 270 park units.

How it was done

1. Field plots. Crews visited thousands of locations at every elevation and in every zone, listing the plant species present and their cover and recording the surrounding environment.
2. Map classes. The plant communities were grouped by the dominant canopy plus telltale understory species, moisture or elevation. All three parks share the same core classes, with a few unique to each park's setting and history.
3. Modeling. Satellite data captured the features most likely to shape vegetation — elevation, topography, climate. The relationship between those data and the plots was worked out point by point, then applied across each park.
4. Resolution. Each pixel is a 3-by-3-meter square. At least 9 pixels were combined into patches and smoothed, so the patches are about 400 square meters — roughly a tenth of an acre.
5. Accuracy. New field data collected just for the check were compared with the map at each point. Every park's map beat the program's 80 percent accuracy standard (areas outside park boundaries were not assessed).

Vegetation map for North Cascades National Park. NPS.

Vegetation map for Mount Rainier National Park. NPS.

The vegetation map for Olympic National Park. Credit: NPS.

Already in use

The maps are helping evaluate marmot habitat at Olympic and refine maps of whitebark pine at Mount Rainier and North Cascades.

Sources

Based on "North Coast and Cascades Network Delivers a New Generation of Vegetation Maps" from the National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.