Weed presence in Idaho, consolidated from datasets provided by BLM Boise District, BLM Twin Falls District, BLM Idaho Falls District, BLM Coeur d'Alene District, and the Idaho Department of Agriculture, from December 2005. Many errors noted. Users must review attributes before using. No corrections to any errors or inconsistencies have been made. See supplementary information.
Approved by data steward 10/15/2008 Truncation of attributes may have occurred when File Geodatabase exported to a shapfile. Draft standards such as genus/species exist in the database design, but were not used. Some fields such as National ownership, local ownership, and source are inconsistently or incorrectly used. The draft standards provided for multiple weed listing in different attribute fields, but multiple weeds were sometimes concatenated into the same attribute (whitetop/hoary cress, cheatgrass/medusahead). Only common names used to identify plant. These include typos, potential multiple references to the same plant (including abbreviations), placenames where the plant was found instead of the plant name, incomplete reference making it difficult to determine which weed was meant, and plants that are not listed as weeds http://plants.usda.gov. Many of the errors with the common name field are due to how the data was compiled, but some exist with the source data. All records are coded as "BLM" for the source data, but approximately 30% of the records are from the Idaho Department of Agriculture. About 8% of the records from the BLM Idaho Falls District were probably provided by the US Forest Service. Source Data: Source data included point, line, and polygons. It includes weed survey/inventories as well as treatment to remove weeds. Points and lines were buffered by a minimal distance to convert them to polygons so that they could be appended to polygon data. This can make it difficult to display/query data. The buffer distance was not identified, but seems to be approximately 0.1 meters. Metadata may or may not exist for the source data. BLM Boise District weeds treatment point data 1996-2004. Fields included site-id, weed common name, treatment type (biologic, chemical, mechanical, chemical-mechanical, and no), treatment year, treatment acreage. BLM Twin Falls District Cheatgrass and Medusahead infested areas from covertypes used in Fire Management Planning, 2003. Metadata. BLM Challis Field Office: Cheatgrass inventory Weed Inventory Weed Treatment polygon - Treatment Year, Weed, application Weed Treatment point - many of the points are not represented in the compiled data. Weed Treatment areas Salmon-Challis NF (?), mostly along rivers & roads. BLM Salmon Field Office: Biological Control point data. Data not represented in compiled data. Metadata Weed Inventory points, lines, and polygons. Metadata. BLM Cottonwood Field Office. 3 point treatment layers, 3 polygon treatment layers. Spraying_2004_24k2.shp was incorrectly compiled into this dataset. The weed_target field should have been used, not the name field which is a placename. Idaho Department of Agriculture 2002-2005. Source includes 2005 polygon inventory data as well as PLSS section summaries for each weed by year. No metadata. It is unclear if all source data was used. Overlap spatially and temporally by different weed species, and precision of data collection may make the data difficult to display/query. Original data indicate numerous weed species in each PLSS section, but the compiled data only list one weed species per section