Ecological regions of Hawai'i

The Hawaiian archipelago encompasses a great deal of variation in several ecological factors, including climate, elevation, and natural communities, and possesses a unique flora with some of the highest levels of endemism in the world. Monitoring assessments that aggregate and summarize data within the archipelago may need to account for ecological variation within the islands that could affect the spatial occurrence of the phenomenon of interest. This delineation of ecological regions within the State of Hawaii is based on the two environmental factors most important for grouping major natural native vegetation zones in the Hawaiian archipelago, moisture regime (based on data collected from 1916 to 1983) and elevation (based on 1983 digital elevation model data). These ecological regions are presented within this data publication in the form of a shapefile and geopackage.
These ecological regions were developed to summarize fine-scale forest health data in Hawai'i for the USDA Forest Service's annual Forest Health Monitoring: National status, trends, and analysis reports (https://www.fs.usda.gov/foresthealth/publications/fhm/fhm-annual-national-reports.shtml).
For more information about these data, see Potter (2020), Potter (2023a,b), and (Potter and Paschke 2023).