Using Ecological Site Information to Improve Landscape Management for Ecosystem Services

Abstract

• Ecological sites and their component state-andtransition models are valuable tools for predicting the effects of climatic and management changes on a variety of ecosystem services.
• Site-specific information must be able to be both refined to finer scales to account for spatiotemporal variability within amapped site and expanded to include interactions with other sites in the landscape to identify priorities and account for integrative disturbances and ecosystem services such as wildlife habitat, hydrology, fire, insect outbreak and invasive species.
• Ecological site groups, spatially contiguous and behaviorally similar, are an important level in the land hierarchy to organize and interpret information.

Keywords: soil survey, natural resource management, Major Land Resource Areas (MLRA).