Cover Types of Yellowstone National Park

The cover types layer is a picture of the current vegetation
communitites in Yellowstone National Park. It is useful in
understanding vagetation patterns, patches, and
fragmentation; conducting fire models and understanding past
fires; stratifing vegetation and other sampling; conducting
habitat analysis of floral and fauna; and for other
vegetation studies.

Plant communities of Yellowstone National Park were
classified by their development since the last major
disturbance into units called cover types. Following a major
disturbance such as fire, vegetation progresses through a
series of plant communities (seral communities) toward the
climax community. This process (succession) can be divided
into the following classes called cover types: recently
disturbed, early, mid , late and climax stages. To date, only
the cover types of forested vegetation have been worked out.
Therefore, this raster map shows the forested cover types of
the Yellowstone Park area. Aerial photographs of 1:15840
nominal scale from before the 1988 fires were interpreted
with the help of ground truth transects throughout the park.
A classified satellite image of October 2, 1988 identifying
burn classes was used to modify the pre 1988 cover type map
to reflect fires. As changes were noted on aerial photography
of 1991 they were incorporated into the map. These were
mostly areas that died after 1988 from surface burn that did
not show on the satellite image.

Aerial photographs of 1:15840 nominal scale from before the
1988 fires were interpreted with the help of ground truth
transects throughout the park and transfered by eye to 15
minute USGS quad sheets (1:62500). These were then digitized
originally in SAGIS and later transfered to GRASS where the
coverage was converted to raster files. Rasters are now in
Arc/Info Grid format.

Attribute information for the data set is as follows:
Described are successional stages of forest vegetation. The
NAME field contains a written out description of the tree
species and the successional stage. The CATEGORY field
contains a alphanumeric code for the tree species and
successional stage. The characters of the code describe the
dominant species (lp = lodgepole pine; wb = whitebark pine;
df = douglas fir; sf = subalpine fir; lpp = pygmy lodgepole
pine; asp = aspen; kh = krummholz;) or nonforest (nf). The
number of the code describes the dominant overstory species
of forest vegetation and is broken into 5 structural classes:
0 = post disturbance to canopy closure; 1 = canopy closure to
maturity; 2 = maturity to break up; 3 = break up to climax;
number absent = climax. The GENERAL field contains a
generalized cover type. The GEN_COLORNAMES contains a symbol
number for the Arc/Info shadeset colornames.