Pacific Northwest Landscape Assessment & Mapping Program

About LAMP

The Landscape Assessment and Mapping Program (LAMP) is a program of the Institute for Natural Resources - Portland, part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Portland State University. INR develops landscape-level natural resource management tools such as predictive models of vegetation and wildlife distributions to assist decision making at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. These models allow planners to visualize current and future conditions for species, vegetation, and aquatic resources, as well as important natural resources, such as timber availability, fire risk, rangeland productivity, and riparian conditions.

LAMP produces maps and other products for many projects in Oregon and across the west. Staff in the PNW-LAMP are part of the Institute for Natural Resources. Staff profiles are available from the INR-OSU website. Major projects include:

Main Projects

Integrated Landscape Assessment Project

The largest project LAMP has been involved with is the Integrated Landscape Assessment Project. The project assessed watershed-level prioritization of land management actions based on fuel conditions, wildlife and aquatic habitats, economic values, and projected climate change across all lands in several western states.

Historical vegetation map for Oregon produced by INR.

Historical Vegetation Maps

The Institute for Natural Resources and its partners have created datasets of historical vegetation at both fine and coarse scales, using several different data sources, including interpretation of public land survey records of the federal government's General Land Office and U.S. Coast Survey topographic maps.

National Park Service Vegetation Mapping

In conjunction with NatureServe, INR's Landscape Assessment and Mapping Program is making remote sensing-based vegetation maps for the major national parks in the Pacific Northwest. Detecting climate change impacts on the distribution of vegetation requires an accurate map of baseline conditions made using a repeatable methodology.

Great Blue Heron at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge.

Wildlife Distribution Modeling

INR develops range and distribution maps for Oregon wildlife species, providing broad geographic information on the status of both rare and common species and their habitats in order to provide land managers, planners, scientists, and policy makers with the information they need to make better-informed conservation decisions.

Oregon Explorer

The Oregon Explorer program is an INR and OSU Libraries natural resources digital library providing access to data, mapping and reporting tools, stories and other archived information to help local citizens, planners and policymakers make more informed decisions about Oregon’s natural resources and communities.

Oregon Spatial Data Library

Many INR and LAMP products are available from the Oregon Spatial Data Library, including current and potential vegetation, wildlife habitat, natural areas, managed areas, and more.