BLM REA YKL 2011 Near-Term Future (2025) Landscape Integrity in the Yukon River Lowlands - Kuskokwim Mountains - Lime Hills

Landscape condition should not be assessed at a particular location without some explicit consideration of the surrounding environment. Landscape intactness provides a quantifiable and readily assessable measure of naturalness: it is a measure of how contiguous a landscape is. The purpose of this dataset is to provide an assessment of the relative landscape condition across a region to identify if the areas with degraded conditions are isolated or connected, which corresponds to how resilient an area might be to future changes. Some elements of human modification, specifically subsistence harvest, are not captured well in current models of intactness. Therefore, we modeled landscape intactness by extracting areas from the Landscape Condition Model (LCM) with a value equal to 5 (corresponding to a score of 0.8 or higher) for the ecoregion, realizing that we likely underrepresented the true degree of human modification. Areas that meet the condition criteria were then lumped together into Large Intact Blocks (LIBs) and total areas of contiguous high condition landscape blocks were calculated. LIBs that are greater than or equal to 50,000 acres are considered as having the highest landscape intactness. Blocks that are less than 50,000 acres but greater than or equal to 10,000 acres correspond to high landscape integrity. Third, we identified all the blocks that are less than 10,000 acres as potentially vulnerable to disturbances. Most of the study area falls within the highest landscape integrity category. However, a substantial amount of small, fragmented areas were indeed identified throughout the region. Most of these fragmented habitats are located around communities and mining operations, but also include some areas fragmented by the larger rivers that serve as snowmachine travel corridors during winter months.