MoJaveData.gov
Title
Mojave Desert Ecosystem Program - a GIS data clearing house
Description
Land managers in the Mojave Desert today are faced with multiple challenges. Expanding economic development causes increased pressure on natural resources while the public demands objective and effective management strategies. Diverse groups seek to achieve conflicting goals that balance multiple demands on fragile, exhaustible resources. These goals include establishing and expanding national parks, creating wilderness areas, protecting threatened and endangered plants and animals, developing recreational areas, and expanding economic development. Given the projections for a tripling of the population in the region over the next twenty years, competition among these interests will increase resulting in fragmentation of conservation and development efforts. As a result, land managers must develop programs that evaluate, monitor, and predict system change including that caused by human impact. The task for Natural Resource Managers becomes one of fully understanding the concepts of natural system processes, integrity, and sustainability and to present sound scientific results to promote true ecosystem management. MDEP establishes the foundation for processes that will allow for the recognition of potential future issues of a stressed ecosystem.
To achieve the task of management at an ecosystem level, obtaining and gaining access to the large, diverse amounts of data on the system becomes crucial to establishing a baseline of ecosystem health. Enormous amounts of Mojave Desert ecosystem data have been gathered by a wide variety of federal, state, local, and private agencies. These data represent a wide variety of issues and topics and were collected at many different scales. However, inaccessibility and incompatibility are issues that prevent integration and widespread use of these data.
Accurate, readily available data describing the dynamics of ecosystem processes provides land managers with the ability to choose appropriate management solutions that minimize unexpected and undesirable outcomes. To be useful, this data must be available to all land managers on an equal basis, in a timely fashion, and in a form that is directly relevant and accessible to their management activities. Today, increased information storage capabilities and advances in computer networking provide a means to organize, access, and distribute large quantities of data. The Mojave Desert Ecosystem Program provides this capability. It is a tool that enables informed decision making for sustainable land management across an entire ecoregion. This area spans more than 80,000 square miles. MDEP has emerged as a multi-agency cooperative effort that transcends both administrative and geopolitical boundaries.
Additional Information
Related Domains
- Arc Info
- Arc View
- Arizona
- Awareness
- Blm
- Barstow
- Base
- California
- Cartography
- China Lake Nas
- Climate
- Culture
- Dod
- Doi
- Data
- Death Valley National Park
- Department Of Defense
- Department Of The Interior
- Desert
- Deserts
- Esri
- Ecology
- Ecosystem
- Edwards Afb
- Environment
- Fort Irwin
- Gis Data
- Geographic Information Systems
- Geology
- Geospatial Data
- Governmental
- Hydrology
- Joshua Tree National Park
- Lake
- Mdei
- Mdep
- Mapping
- Marine
- Marine Corp Logistics Base
- Mead
- Mojave
- Mojave Desert
- Mojave Ecoregion
- Mojave National Preserve
- Nellis Afb
- Nevada
- Nine
- Organizations
- Palms
- Preservation
- Regions
- Satellite Imagery
- Science
- Southwest
- Twenty
- United States
- Utah
- Vegetation
- ARC Info
- ARC View
- BLM
- China Lake NAS
- DOD
- DOI
- ESRI
- Edwards AFB
- GIS Data
- MDEI
- MDEP
- Nellis AFB
- North America
- Regional