From Pixels to Landscapes: Leveraging LANDFIRE for Land Management

Landfire products have become the toolbox for large landscape management, way beyond obvious applications to do with fire and fuels. From mapping arbuscular fungi to modeling scary cryptic zooid habitat, from tracking grizzly bears to protecting butterflies, from developing full-scale state forest assessments to looking at climate disturbance, LANDFIRE covers a lot of territory. In this presentation Randy Swaty will tour some of the most used LANDFIRE datasets, share ideas for use in your work and explore how others have leveraged these products for natural resource management.

Biography: 
Randy Swaty joined the Michigan chapter of The Nature Conservancy in 2002 as a Forest Ecologist, tasked with working with a variety of owners of large landscapes to promote sustainable management practices and leading the LANDFIRE Rapid Assessment effort in the Lake States region. His scientific specialties cover spatial scales ranging from community genetics to mycorrhizal ecology and landscape-scale planning.

Randy joined LANDFIRE fulltime in 2007, and has covered a variety of bases, including working to improve forest certification standards, participating in Conservation Area Planning, serving on the Conservancy's Forest Management SOP team, and contributing to the Global Fire Assessment. He develops vegetation models and applies LANDFIRE products within and outside of the Conservancy. He facilitates workshops and seminars on the use of LANDFIRE data and products and is one of the leaders of the Biophysical Settings Review project.

He grew up in Little Rock and earned both Bachelor and Masters degrees at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He splits his time between Marquette, MI and Evanston, IL.