Midwest Terrestrial Habitat System 2025

<p>In recognition of the need for landscape-scale planning to
address the conservation challenges of the Midwestern United States, the
Midwest Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies passed a resolution endorsing
the Midwest Landscape Initiative, a collaborative that identifies shared
conservation priorities and develops solutions for healthy, functioning
ecosystems in the Midwest (MAFWA 2019). To address these goals the Midwest
Landscape Initiative identified an opportunity to create a regional terrestrial
habitat system that could provide consistent and structured description of
natural and cultural habitats across the region. The regional habitat data aids
partners by providing a common lexicon through which conservation planning for
priority habitats can be communicated and coordinated across states and
geographies.</p>

<p>The Midwest Terrestrial Habitat System (MWTHS) represents
the distribution of a hierarchical classification of natural and cultural
vegetation and landcover types. The MWTHS is derived from data that was
initially modeled by LANDFIRE Consortium using AI methods and remote sensing to
predict ecological systems (LANDFIRE 2016). NatureServe then cross walked the
natural systems to the National Vegetation Classification (NVC) while also
making additional spatial improvements to the current version (0.946) of the
map (NatureServe, unpublished data). The MWTHS currently uses NatureServe’s
v0.946 map but, also includes the cultural habitats, originally specified by
LANDFIRE. Three levels of the NVC classification are identified in the MWTHS:
at the finest levels are NVC groups, then macrogroups, and finally divisions.
Additionally, the MWTHS also incorporates current coordination between
NatureServe and Midwestern states to cross walk NVC groups with each state’s
heritage vegetation classes (<b>note</b>: Kansas uses NVC classifications as
their state heritage system, so Kansas did not require a cross walk and is not
included as a separate column in the raster attribute table). Therefore, for
each mapped group in the MWTHS viewers can explore the state heritage
vegetation classes that overlap and vice versa.</p>

<p><b>To download this data</b> and full metadata, <a href='https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/6813cdf4d4be023163051883' target='_blank' rel='nofollow ugc noopener noreferrer'>click here to navigate to ScienceBase</a>.</p>