Implementation of the Terrestrial Ecological Unit Inventory Geospatial Toolkit for National Forest Lands in the Southwestern USA.

The Terrestrial Ecological Unit Inventory (TEUI) geospatial toolkit is currently being used to digitally map ecological units across the landscape  on National Forest System lands of  the southwestern United States. The TEUI geospatial toolkit allows field scientists the ability to visualize, delineate, and analyze complex patterns of soil, vegetation, landforms and climate in an integrated manner. This application combines spatial and tabular data through image processing, geographic information systems and data base management tools to stratify complex landscapes into ecological units.

Utilizing the capabilities of the TEUI geospatial toolkit with shapefiles and raster data, allows field scientists to assess the degree of similarity and diversity within an ecological unit.  The statistical routines within the TEUI geospatial toolkit analyzes the variability of ecological types within and between ecological units. Furthermore, we show how ecological modeling using direct gradient analysis is supported by climate and terrain data contained within the TEUI geospatial toolkit.  Finally, statistical analysis routines within the TEUI geospatial toolkit ensure that combinations of ecological units are spatially extrapolated with confidence and meet quality assurance objectives.