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 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 LCSTRAT1992 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.
Supplemental_Information:
Land Cover Code
11 Water
12 Evergreen Forest
13 Mixed Forest
14 Deciduous Forest
15 Transitional
16 Perennial Herbaceous
17 Annual Herbaceous
18 Barren
22 Forested Suburban
26 Herbaceous Surburban
38 Urban
Citations
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