Abstract:
Many land cover interpretations strive for an Anderson Level 2 (Anderson et al., 1976) classification. The important distinction splits Anderson Level 1 cover types such as Forest and Agriculture into more specific cover types such as Deciduous or Coniferous Forest and Row Crops or Pasture. These divisions provide more information when a modeling effort studies wildlife that favor specific forest types (Mahan et al., 2010) and agricultural models to predict watershed condition (Brooks et al., 2002). While this level of detail is beneficial in these instances many studies seek to model ecological condition where too much detail can become challenging to understand. When ecological condition is the goal detailed classifications can produce confusing results, thus, it is common practice to reclassify the original land cover to better target a specified project goal. This version of NLCD2001 targeted forest, suburban and urban classes as import groupings and kept the distinction between pasture and row crop. Several ecological condition projects used this layer as coarse scale step and then compared these results with site level data collected in the field. In particular this layer was used to help plan the Pennsylvania’s second breeding bird atlas project (O’Connell et al., 2004).
Supplemental_Information:
Land Cover Code
1 Water
2 Low Density Urb
3 High Density Urb
4 Hay_Pasture
5 Row_Crop
6 Conifer_Forest
7 Mixed_Forest
8 Deciduous_Forest
9 Beach
10 Transitional
Citations
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