Journal Article

NATIONAL LAND-COVER PATTERN DATA

Jones, K. Bruce, Vogelmann, James E., Riitters, Kurt H., Wickham, James D.

2000

Overview

Land cover and its spatial patterns are key ingredients in ecological studies that consider large regions and the impacts of human activities. Because land‐cover maps show only cover types and their locations, further processing is needed to extract pattern information and to characterize its spatial variability. We are producing a nationally consistent spatial database of six land‐cover pattern indices: forest area density, forest connectivity, the U index (a measure of general land‐use pressure by humans), land‐cover connectivity, land‐cover diversity, and landscape pattern types. We use the land‐cover maps produced by the Multi‐resolution Land Characteristics Consortium for the conterminous United States at 30‐m resolution. The goal of this paper is to encourage use of the pattern data as: contextual information and independent variables for studies involving a set of field sites; indicators of landscape conditions for ecological assessments; and dependent variables in biogeographic and socioeconomic models. The new maps will be most useful in studies that require consistent and comparable land‐cover pattern measurements over large regions and can be combined with the original land‐cover maps and other data. The complete data sets corresponding to abstracts published in the Data Papers section of the journal are published electronically in Ecological Archives at http://esa.sdsc.edu/Archive. (The accession number for each Data Paper is given directly beneath the title.)

• Subject: biogeography / data collection / forests / humans / ingredients / land cover / land use / landscapes / United States