BLM REA YKL 2011 Current Landscape Condition per 5th Level Hydrologic Unit in the Yukon River Lowlands - Kuskokwim Mountains - Lime Hills

Some of the YKL rasters intentionally do not align or have the same extent. These rasters were not snapped to a common raster per the authors' discretion. Please review selected rasters prior to use. These varying alignments are a result of the use of differing source data sets and all products derived from them. We recommend that users snap or align rasters as best suits their own projects. - As a final measure of potential human impacts to the ecoregions, the impacts of current anthropogenic development are summarized per 5th level hydrologic unit by the landscape condition model (LCM). The LCM weights the relative influence of different types of human footprints based on factors like permanence, nature of the activity, etc. Permanent human modification is weighted the highest, while temporary use (like snow roads, snow machine trails, etc) receive less weight. Intensive land uses like mining are also weighted higher than less intensive land uses like hunting cabins. These weights are summed across the landscape and coalesced into a single surface identifying how impacted a given area is due to human modification. Categories of human impacts included in this analysis are transportation infrastructure, urban and industrial development, and invasive species. Distance decay values are assigned to each impact such that the impact declines with increasing distance from infrastructure. Human impacts of each type are merged according to MIN rules to create a final dataset. This analysis is intended to identify the current level of human impact in the study area. The landscape condition model can be compared with the distribution of individual Conservation Elements to determine the potential spatial range of human impacts on Conservation Elements.