Landscape Pattern Monitoring Portal Now Active!
The Forest Service, the Southern Blues Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project, and the Blue Mountains Forest Partners worked together to build a web application that would help map and monitor changes in land cover and landscape pattern as a result of management activities and disturbances. One of the most important considerations for this work was that it should be inclusive of all agencies and organizations that collaboratively manage the landscape; as such, the workflow needed to be developed in an accessible location, without the use of proprietary data, without the use of costly software licenses, and in a manner that would be accessible to non-experts of remote sensing technologies. The result was the Landscape Pattern Monitoring Portal, an externally-facing web application that assists users in collecting training data, mapping land cover for two points in time, and computing landscape pattern metrics all through the use of free and open-source software. The portal is now available at this link: https://ecoshare.info/landscapeportal/