US Forest Atlas FIA Modeled Abundance (Image Service)

FIA Modeled Abundance:
This dataset portrays the live tree mean basal area (square feet per acre) of the species across the contiguous United States. The underlying data publication contains raster maps of live tree basal area for each tree species along with corresponding assessment data. An efficient approach for mapping multiple individual tree species over large spatial domains was used to develop these raster datasets. The method integrates vegetation phenology derived from MODIS imagery and raster data describing relevant environmental parameters with extensive field plot data of tree species basal area to create maps of tree species abundance and distribution at a 250-meter (m) pixel size for the contiguous United States. The approach uses the modeling techniques of k-nearest neighbors and canonical correspondence analysis, where model predictions are calculated using a weighting of nearest neighbors based on proximity in a feature space derived from the model. The approach also utilizes a stratification derived from the 2001 National Land-Cover Database tree canopy cover layer. This data depicts current species abundance and distribution across the contiguous United States, modeled by using FIA field plot data. Although the absolute values associated with the maps differ from species to species, the highest values within each map are always associated with darker colors. This is a digital representation of maps by Elbert L. Little, Jr., published between 1971 and 1977. These maps were based on botanical lists, forest surveys, field notes and herbarium specimens.

This record was taken from the USDA Enterprise Data Inventory that feeds into the https://data.gov catalog. Data for this record includes the following resources: ISO-19139 metadata ArcGIS Hub Dataset ArcGIS GeoService For complete information, please visit https://data.gov.