FRESH-Deer Multi Patch Application

The FRESH-Deer GIS AddIn is an extension of the Esri ArcMap software and is based on a stand-alone application that was originally developed by the United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and the University of Alaska Anchorage, Departments of Biology (and Computer Science). The GIS AddIn uses raster map inputs to provide a “snapshot” analysis of available forage at one user-specified point in time. It is assumed that all available vegetation is potential food, and there is no accounting for long-term herbivore-plant dynamics (e.g., the effects of over-browsing and herbivory), population size, predation, or environmental factors. This is not a simulation model. Rather, it is a habitat capability calculator: given specific values of available forage biomass, its nutritional quality, and animal requirements, FRESH calculates the maximum number of “animal days” (one adult female deer for 1 day) that can be sustained by the forage resource. For example, 22 animal days could be one animal for 22 days, or 22 animals for one day, or any combination thereof.

The FRESH GIS AddIn provides a mechanism to examine habitat quality in a landscape with multiple habitat patches.   The GIS AddIn begins with a user-provided GIS raster map of vegetation types across a landscape. We are using the following definition of Vegetation Type: A named category of plant community or vegetation defined on the basis of shared floristic and/or physiognomic characteristics that distinguish it from other kinds of plant communities or vegetation (FGDC 2008). This term can refer to units in any level of the National Vegetation Classification (NVC) hierarchy (FGDC 2008) (Nelson et al. 2015).

Analysis of the landscape employs a moving window, the size of the mean deer home range (specified by the user), which assigns each cell in the raster a value for  available forage based on the nutritional data of the plants found in the vegetation type, elevation, and snow depth. During each iteration of the moving window analysis, the AddIn compiles all available forage within the home range into one composite array of forage and uses a linear programming algorithm to calculate the animal-days/ha average value for that “home range.”

Please Note: The most recent version of ArcMap software tested with the FRESH-Deer GIS AddIn is ArcGIS 10.7.1 and requires a license for the Spatial Analyst extension in order to run the program. The available files below are .zip files and will need to be downloaded to your PC. 

• FRESH-Deer GIS AddIn (FRESHADDinPackage.zip)
• Appendicies zip files (FRESH_Veg_Datasets_Appendicies.zip)
  • Appendix A Master Forage by Species Nutritional Datasets
  • Appendix B Master Forage by Veg Types Nutritional Datasets
  • Appendix C Calculating DP DDM DE WSU Lap Results
  • Appendix D YG TWYGS Calibration Predicted Biomas
  • Appendix E FRESH_Deer EcoPlot FIA GeoProcess UPF Nonforested Veg Analysis
  • Appendix F UPF NF Veg Summary EcoPlots
  • Appendix G SDM Renalysis Deer Summary
• User Guides