Our largest study site is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is part of the Colorado Plateau. The Monument ranges in elevation from 1,370 m to 2,530 m and encompasses over 850,000 ha. Random plot locations were selected in 18 vegetation types with the most common being pinyon, pinyon-juniper, blackbrush, riparian, and desert grasslands, with a few rare types including ponderosa pine and aspen. Additional sites were randomly located in rare habitat types (e.g., wetlands, washes, and relict plant habitats as they were encountered in the field. Almost the entire Monument is grazed by cattle, and some areas have been affected by fires, which were rare disturbances in historic times and are now made more frequent by fuels added by invasive grasses (primarily cheatgrass, Bromus tectorum). Over 350 vegetation plots have been established in the Monument under varying land use and disturbance regimes.
Improving predictive capabilities in space and time is crucial to the early detection and cost-effective control of invasive species, and to preserving native species and habitats in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. This - our largest study site to date - provides an important context for the use of NASA data and technology, and, most important, integrates NASA data into proven domain-specific, multiscale and multiphase sampling techniques that are crucial to characterizing the ecosystem structural and functional changes related to invasive species and biotic integrity.
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