Read the full story from the UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability.
From Nebraska to California, Texas to Montana, the Western United States has a lot of wide-open spaces — hundreds of millions of acres’ worth. Keeping track of the changes in vegetation across this vast expanse has posed a challenge to land managers and conservationists seeking to make informed decisions about the use of public and private lands.
Gregory Okin, a UCLA geography professor, has now made those efforts a whole lot easier, having teamed with colleagues from UCLA, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and NASA to develop a powerful web-based mapping tool called LandCART, short for Landscape Cover Analysis and Reporting Tools.