GIS Mapping

The Wild Utah Project provides computerized mapping, or GIS (Geographic Information Systems) support to non-profit organizations working on conservation issues. We tailor our efforts to help conservation partners such as the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Utah Wilderness Coalition, Save Our Canyons, Western Wildlife Conservancy and many others make the best use of GIS technology to further their respective causes. These products complement, enhance, refine, explain, research, and present up-to-date geographic information to a wide array of audiences including the United States Congress, state and federal land agencies, courts of law, media outlets, the public at large, and peers in science.

Some of our maps can be viewed in The Ecological Importance and Biological Uniqueness of the Greater Canyonlands Ecoregion.  Wild Utah Project produced this report on behalf of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

The mapping projects for our conservation partners provide scientific and GIS support that is often not otherwise available to them. Some examples include analysis and GIS studies that: build an ecological framework into wilderness campaigns, counter off-road vehicle management problems, guide ecologically based grazing decisions, and help guide federal land management plans and plan revisions. These projects range from very labor intensive, sophisticated spatial analysis such as our Heart of the West SITES analysis (Heart of the West Map and Core Areas Map), to simple maps that illustrate, for example, a map of differing travel plans (Unauthorized Routes in the Logan Ranger District) . We anticipate working on as many projects for our conservation partners in the coming year as we did in the past year. Following are brief descriptions of some of the projects the Wild Utah Project has recently completed or are currently underway for our conservation partners:

• To keep the Utah Wilderness Coalition’s (UWC) wilderness proposal current, we made changes to the proposal driven by land exchanges, new BLM wilderness inventory data, BLM travel plans, recent land use plans, and proposed development. Titled “America’s Redrock Wilderness Act,” this national legislative proposal has 159 House and 15 Senate co-sponsors (go to databasing.org to download UtahWildernessCoalition_Wildprop_v2008 for the most current version of the UWC proposal).  Our GIS coverages of the UWC’s wilderness proposal affects land use today. BLM land managers, mineral development companies, state agencies, and our conservation partners currently have our detailed GIS data to use in their work. See some examples of our work on the UWC website at http://www.protectwildutah.org/proposal/index.html.

• Wild Utah Project also performed similar work involving the creation and maintenance of roadless area proposals for Red Rock Forests, Save Our Canyons, the Utah Forest Network, and others.

• Wild Utah Project provided GIS and biological analysis on off-road vehicle use on Utah’s BLM lands. Using numerous sources, we assembled the first-ever statewide maps of off-road vehicle designations on BLM lands in Utah, which will assist the BLM in managing the growing number of impacts from vehicle use.

• To assist local people and conservation groups like the Boulder Mountain Regional Group in the Escalante area, the Wild Utah Project, using GIS analysis, assembled what will be a starting point for a watershed approach to planning. This is something that has not occurred among the many different landowners and managers in this area.

For information about our conservation partners please go to our Partners page.