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Protecting Elk Country with GIS- Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation teams with Geodata Services of Missoula

Habitat for the American elk once spread across much of North America. There were only a handful of states in which these magnificent animals didn’t thrive. Now elk are found in less than half of the states, with a core range in the west.

In 1984, individuals concerned with the animals’ population decline came together to form the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF)http://www.rmef.org . It aimed to ensure the future of elk, other wildlife, and wildlife habitat. Throughout the past 20 years, RMEF has conserved or helped to conserve more than four million acres of important wildlife habitat throughout the United States.

The meetings also helped to capture knowledge and transfer it from one generation of biologists to another. This was particularly important when it came to people who were nearing retirement. Based on the input, RMEF’s prime contractor for the project, Geodata Services, compiled all of the data into a seamless, midscale (1:250,000) map. For the first time ever, anyone who wanted to get a big-picture look at the state of elk and their habitat had a visual resource that incorporated the best knowledge available to date.

By: Keith Lenard, Paul Queneau, Ken Wall

Geodata Services, Inc. http://www.geodata-mt.com/ provided technical assistance to map North American elk habitat using ESRI ArcGIS products http://esri.com/ , CommunityViz from the Orton Famiy Foundation http://www.CommunityViz.org , Web services from the U.S. Geological Survey’s The National Map and the National Geographic Society, remotely sensed imagery from Landsat and Space Imaging, and image compression and Web software from Lizardtech http://www.lizardtech.com/ .

Full Article: http://www.geospatial-online.com/geospatialsolutions/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=125697

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