The Prairie Landscape Inventory (PLI) working team of Fish and Wildlife, Ministry of Environment aims to develop improved methods of assessing land cover and land use for conservation. Native grassland, in particular, has been one of the hardest to map at-risk ecosystems because of the difficulty of imagery classification methods to distinguish native from tame grasslands. To that end, the Prairie Landscape Inventory working team is gathering input from a small group of experts to train and validate the mapping of native and tame grasslands across the Saskatchewan prairie ecozone and Boreal Transition ecoregion. After collection, data undergoes a Quality Assurance/Quality Control process and is combined with the existing dataset.

Data has been amalgamated from different years into one dataset. Attributes that were collected with each point have differed over the years, so some data points have less information available within the attribute table than others. Data was collected in the Mixed Grassland ecoregion in 2016-2019. In 2020-2023, data was collected in the Moist Mixed Grassland, Aspen Parkland, Boreal Transition and Cypress Upland ecoregions.

PLI fieldwork cheat sheet (summer 2023):

Native: composed of at least 75% native grass species such as the needle grasses, wheatgrasses along with June grass and blue gramma grass; also includes additional sedge species, forbs, and some non-vascular species. Unbroken grassland that is invaded by species like Kentucky bluegrass, crested wheatgrass or smooth brome, such that native cover is < 75%, is not considered native for the purpose of this project.

Tame: composed of at least 75% seeded or planted species with introduced grasses and forb species such as crested wheatgrass, smooth brome, alfalfa, sweet clover.

Mixed/Altered: a heterogenic grassland with a mix of less than 75% native grass species or less than 75% tame species.

Shrubs: dominated by woody vegetation of relatively low height (generally +/- 2 meters) with shrub canopy typically > 20% of total vegetation cover (including regenerating forest).

Trees: coniferous/deciduous trees, mixed-wood area, and other trees > 2m height with tree canopy typically > 20% of total vegetation cover.

Cropland: all cultivated areas with crop commodities

Exposed land/Barren: land that is at least 50% non-vegetated and non-developed including glacier, rock, sediments, burned areas, rubble, mines, and other naturally occurring non-vegetated surfaces.

Water: permanent water sources such as lakes and rivers.

Wetland: land with a water table near/at/above soil surface for enough time to promote wetland or aquatic processes.

Urban/developed: land that is predominantly built-up or developed and vegetation associated with these land covers.

Minimum patch size is 10 m x 10 m to be classified.

2016-2019 ground truth points were used as part of the following published paper:

Badreldin, N.; Prieto, B.; Fisher, R. Mapping Grasslands in Mixed Grassland Ecoregion of Saskatchewan Using Big Remote Sensing Data and Machine Learning. Remote Sens. 2021, 13, 4972.

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13244972