Footprints on Federal Lands — GIS Modeling of Human Use of Public Lands

Large areas in western North America are publicly owned and managed by government agencies for a variety of uses. As the human population continues to grow, competing interests will place mounting pressures on how resources from these lands should be managed and used by people.

This poster illustrates a GIS protocol for modeling the intensity of local human use of public lands. It focuses on a 2.2 million hectare area surrounding the Lolo National Forest in western Montana.

The method offers land managers and planners a way to evaluate and visualize human impacts in a spatial sense. For instance, the dasymetric map of human population density provides a more detailed picture of where people live than does a traditional choropleth map of census data.

By incorporating the network of roads and trails, areas that are readily accessible to humans — and hence more likely to be used — can be identified. Although this method is suited to an assessment of human impacts on terrestrial and aquatic species, it could be applied to problems in other disciplines, and in particular, to risk assessments related to wildfire or exposure to contaminants.

Further details are available as written by Schumacher, J.V., R.L. Redmond, M.M. Hart, and M.E. Jensen in "Mapping Patterns of Human Use and Potential Resource Conflicts on Public Lands," Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 64:127-137, 2000.