Implementation of Terrestrial Ecological Unit Inventory Geospatial (TEUI) Toolkit for Mapping Sky Island Ecosystems of the Coronado National Forest, Arizona USA.

The Terrestrial Ecological Unit Inventory (TEUI) provides a systematic description, classification, mapping, and interpretation of ecological units across National Forest System Lands in the Southwestern US. Ecological units are mapped areas of land with distinctive landscape elements (i.e. climate, geology, geomorphology, soils and potential vegetation). The goal of TEUI efforts on the Coronado National Forest is to provide geospatial and tabular ecosystem inventory data and interpretations for site specific projects and landscape level Forest planning. This goal is accomplished in part by the implementation of the TEUI Geospatial Toolkit.

The Coronado National Forest spans 1.78 million acres across southeastern Arizona. It has 12 individual mountain ranges (‘Sky Islands”) with elevations from 3000 to 10720 feet. The Sky Islands are where the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico converges with the Rocky Mountains between the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts. Life zones range from desert to subalpine forest. The physical and biological diversity of the Coronado National Forest present a unique challenge in ecological mapping and land management including restoration activities. The TEUI Geospatial Toolkit provides users with a consistent platform to map ecological units across dynamic landscapes.

The TEUI Toolkit is an ArcGIS™ application developed by the USDA Forest Service Geospatial Service and Technology Center (GSTC). It is a multifunctional tool providing a quantitative, statistical approach to landscape stratification and ecosystem mapping. The connotative legend function stratifies datasets into user created classes, and combines the classes in the attribute table. The statistics package provides comparisons of individual polygons and map units across multiple raster layers, enabling users to assess the variability(or continuity) of an ecological unit. Data developed for the Coronado National Forest will be spatially consistent and statistically robust through the utility of the TEUI Toolkit