BIA

BLM Utah is conducting river shoreline surveys with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).  Many of the rivers are located in very steep sandstone cliff formations that are hundreds of feet deep and are dangerous or inaccessible to surveyors. To delineate the current shorelines of some of the most challenging areas along the San Juan and Green Rivers, we used National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) 2011 imagery.  The imagery was georectified using ground survey data—X, Y, and Z coordinates—collected at accessible field points that were distinctive on the aerial photographs.

LANDFIRE, also known as Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools, is an interagency effort to store more than 20 vegetation, fire, and fuels vegetation geospatial layers for the United States in a centralized repository. In 2013, several Tribes and Bureau of Indian Affairs regions contributed a variety of datasets to the LANDFIRE program to assist with the update of LANDFIRE’s remotely sensed analyses.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has about 80 permanent Remote Sensing Weather Stations (RAWS), and about 19 portable RAWS, for helping assess Wildland Fire Danger across Indian country. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) RAWS Depot offers interagency data collection and distribution support through their database system.  

In FY2011, the BIA started integrating remote sensing into forest inventory and management planning efforts in remote, low timber value and inaccessible areas to meet a 2015 Forest Management Deadline. This deadline states that all Reservations with forested land must be under a management plan by the end of 2015. Some of these reservation lands are remote and have limited access to the forested areas, others are bordering Mexico and are dangerous places for field collection and others are not accessible for various reasons.