Maps of contemporary subsistence land use in rural Interior Alaska derived from predictive models

This geospatial dataset provides model-based predictive maps of subsistence land use in rural Interior Alaska. Subsistence harvesting of wild resources is crucial to the well-being of Alaska Natives and rural Alaskans. The development of these community and regional scale maps was intended to improve our understanding of the spatial extent and patterns of subsistence practices, to support communication among land users, and to facilitate predictions of the human impacts from changes in resource availability, climate and environment, land use, and policy. Logistic regression models for predicting subsistence land use were developed using publicly-available maps of documented subsistence use areas assembled by Alaska Department of Fish and Game for 30 communities (Neufeld et al. 2019). Separate models were used for remote communities and road-connected communities. The best-fit models of subsistence land use probability included the terms: distance to community, distance to main travel corridors (rivers for remote communities; roads and rivers for road-connected communities), distance to lakes (for remote communities only), and community population size. The models were applied to 64 rural communities throughout the Interior region to generate probability maps of subsistence land use at the community level (file names: probability_subsistence_*communitytype*_*CommunityName*.tif). A regional probability map of subsistence land use was constructed using the maximum probability value per pixel from community-level maps (file name: probability_subsistence_InteriorAK.tif). Maps of predicted subsistence use areas were created by classifying the community-level probability maps into used and unused areas (file name: classification_subsistence_InteriorAK.zip). Classification accuracy ranged from 83-86%. Results suggest a large spatial extent (353,771 square kilometers (km2)) of subsistence land use in Interior Alaska, comprising ~60% of the region’s land area. These data were produced as part of a study “Geospatial patterns and models of subsistence land use in rural Interior Alaska” by D. R. N. Brown, T. J. Brinkman, G. Neufeld, L. Navarro, C. L. Brown, H. S. Cold, B. L. Woods, and B. L. Ervin published with Ecology and Society (Brown et al., 2022), https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol27/iss2/art23/.