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Field Trip at The Wildlife Society’s Annual Meeting 2019

The ESA Vegetation Panel Education and Outreach sub-committee travels periodically to conferences across the US to promote the use of the USNVC, and to explain resources that are available to the USNVC user community. A few members of the Veg Panel traveled to Reno, Nevada to host a field trip titled, US National Vegetation Classification: Putting Habitat Management in Context, at The Wildlife Society (TWS) and American Fisheries Society’s joint meeting in 2019.

This workshop aimed to helped participants learn about the USNVC and the many applications it could have to their work in habitat management.

Workshop participants included representatives from across the U.S. including Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Virginia. They were eager to learn how the USNVC inter-relates with other common forms of ecological classification and mapping. The organizers gave an overview to the NVC, and included common applications of the NVC in natural resource inventory, assessment, planning, and monitoring. At the end of the morning session participants were able to see the USNVC in a broader context and to understood how the hierarchical levels of the classification relate to one another. After morning lectures and in-depth discussion addressing diverse perspectives from workshop participants, the group set out for the field trip portion of the workshop. Participants got to apply what they had learned and discussed that morning, visiting a cross-sections of vegetation types as they naturally occurred across environmental gradients of the western Great Basin and adjacent Sierra Nevada. They also experienced how challenging it can be to identify vegetation types on the ground. Under the guidance of the organizers, the group used USNVC resources to identify vegetation types at several different sites.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to attend one of the ESA Vegetation Panel’s workshops or field trips in the past, their next field trip will be hosted in Salt Lake City, UT at the ESA Annual Meeting August 2nd to 7th. Read our article on the field trip and other Veg Panel activities taking place at the meeting here.