Completing the Land Resource Hierarchy

• Published in: Rangelands Vol. 38; no. 6; pp. 313 - 317
• Main Authors: Salley, Shawn W, Monger, H. Curtis, Brown, Joel R
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Littleton Society for Range Management 01.12.2016; Elsevier Inc; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: Classification; climatic zones; Decision making; ecological site groups; ecological sites; ECOLOGICAL SITES FOR LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT; Ecosystems; generalized state-and-transition models; Handbooks; issues and policy; land resource hierarchy; Land resources; Land use planning; landscape classification; landscape ecology; landscapes; Mapping; Natural resources; Natural Resources Conservation Service; soil; Soil sciences; Taxonomy; vegetation; Vocabularies & taxonomies; ecological sites; ecological site groups; landscape ecology; generalized state-and-transition models; landscape classification; land resource hierarchy
• ISSN: 0190-0528; 1551-501X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.rala.2016.10.003

The Land Resource Hierarchy is a useful framework for organizing natural resource information and can provide both insight and explanation while maintaining consistency in terminology, concepts, and interpretations across scales is a challenge. While some scales of the Land Resource Hierarchy are well developed, with all land area assigned to quantitatively defined groups, other scales lack organizing concepts, relationships, and definitions that allow for testing and revision. Ecological sites and ecological site groups represent distinct scales in the Land Resource Hierarchy framework, so they should be based on appropriate quantitative variables that can be used to define and communicate their extent and behavior.