USE OF CLOUD-BASED GEOSPATIAL APPLICATIONS FOR PSEUDOKARST, RANGELAND, AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Twin Falls District is located in Southern Idaho and manages over 3.9 million acres of public lands. The district encompasses multiple departments and is responsible for the management of recreational areas, livestock, native vegetation, and wildlife habitats. Additionally, Craters of the Moon National Monument is a 750,000 acre lava flow contained within the Twin Falls district. Co-managed by the BLM and the National Parks Service (NPS), Craters of the Moon contains pseudokarst systems formed by the volcanic landscape created during basaltic eruptions over the past 15,000 years.

Pseudokarst systems, livestock management areas, recreation areas, and locations of sensitive plant and animal populations must be monitored on a yearly basis by BLM employees within the Twin Falls District. The use of cloud-based geospatial applications such as Collector for ArcGIS will be utilized to help streamline the large amount of data that must be collected by each management department. Creation of maps using ESRI GIS software ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap will aim to combine the efforts of each department onto one map for use by BLM employees in the Collector cloud-based application.

The use of Collector in this regard will increase the efficiency of the BLM workflow by allowing employees to assist each other with data collection while also eliminating the need to collect data on paper. In addition to this project, ArcMap will be used to correct problematic data on Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) as well the GTLF (Ground Transportation Linear Feature Dataset) which is a part of a national dataset. Both are utilized by BLM offices throughout the state of Idaho.