Designing Sustainable Landscapes: DSLland and Subsysland

DSLland is the land cover map used as an organizational framework in the Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) project (McGarigal et al 2017). It is derived primarily from The Nature Conservancy's Northeast Habitat Classification map (Ferree and Anderson 2013; Anderson et al. 2013; Olivero and Anderson 2013; Olivero-Sheldon et al 2014). To meet the needs of the DSL project, we substantially modified the TNC map. The TNC map is a hierarchical classification. For our purposes, we adopted the 'habitat' level of the hierarchy, which we refer to as "ecosystems", as our finest scale, as it is the most appropriate classification for our ecological assessment. The attribute table also includes the ‘formation’ level for users that prefer a coarse classification.