TERRESTRIAL ECOLOGICAL UNIT INVENTORY (TEUI) - GEOSPATIAL TOOLKIT

Terrestrial Ecological Unit Inventory (TEUI) is a Forest Service land survey system that provides baseline resource information to local resource specialists and land planners. TEUI stratifies landscapes into repeating units based on environmental variables including climate, landform, geology, vegetation, and soils. TEUI inventory products serve as core data in project planning, watershed analysis, burn area rehabilitation, and forest plan revisions. The TEUI-Geospatial Toolkit accesses and combines the capabilities of remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS) technology, and raw computing power in an easy-to-use format that allows TEUI specialists to formulate mapping concepts and digitize ecological units directly into GIS. The toolkit is being developed as a "push-button" menu-driven application requiring minimal knowledge of remote sensing and GIS technologies. The TEUI-Geospatial Toolkit is a prototype software application that will help modernize natural resource inventory by providing specialists with new easy-to-use digital tools to visualize, map, and interactively analyze terrestrial landscapes. The TEUI-Geospatial Toolkit functions entirely within the Forest Service corporate hardware/software platform. Products generated by this toolkit utilize and are compatible with Arc/Info™, ArcView™, Access™, ERDAS Imagine™, Visual Basic™, Oracle™ databases, and the Forest Service’s Natural Resource Information System Terrestrial Module (NRIS-Terra). Although the TEUI-Geospatial Toolkit has been designed specifically for TEUI resource specialists, the concept of customized toolkits has the potential to be redirected and focused on any number of resource applications.