Designing Sustainable Landscapes: All Ecological Settings

The ecological settings products include a broad suite of static as well as dynamic abiotic and biotic variables representing the natural and anthropogenic environment at each location (cell). Static variables are those that do not change over time (e.g., elevation, incident solar radiation). Dynamic settings are available for 2010 and 2080; static settings are available for 2010. Dynamic variables are those that change over time in response to succession and the drivers (e.g., growing season degree days, traffic rate). Most of the settings variables are continuous and thus represent landscape heterogeneity as continuous (e.g., slope, biomass), although some are categorical and thus represent heterogeneity as discrete (e.g., developed, hard development). Importantly, the settings variables include a broad but parsimonious suite of attributes that can be used to define the ecological system at any point in time; they are considered primary determinants of ecosystem composition, structure and function, and determine the ecological similarity between any two locations. As such, they play a key role in the ecological integrity assessment, they are used in species' habitat models to represent important habitat components, as appropriate, and are sometimes used in other model components. The settings provide a rich, multivariate representation of important landscape attributes.