Riparian and aquatic resources are precious to the desert Southwest. Existing information on these systems is often missing, qualitative, inconsistent, or lacks detail. We conducted two collaborative projects on National Forests and Grasslands to characterize ecosystem structure, composition, and connectivity. The Riparian Existing Vegetation mapping (REV) project resulted in detailed mapping of vegetation features on 182,000ha. The Aquatic-Riparian Inventory (ARI) represents a statistical sample with 1ha plots, leveraging high resolution imagery and 3D-viewing to interpret vegetation cover, bank cover, and stream features on 660 samples. REV and ARI are integrated within a regional inventory, monitoring, and assessment framework.
