Large Forest Blocks, New York State

Large forest blocks are important features on the landscape and worthy of conservation attention. Maintenance of large blocks of intact habitat is perhaps the most oft recommended biodiversity conservation strategy. We created a map of large forest blocks by selecting all of the forest formations from the Ecological Systems dataset and converting this raster coverage into a polygon coverage using ArcMap. We then used the area function within the resulting attribute table to calculate areas of forest habitats across the state. Last, we classified them according to parameters originally developed by the Orange County Open Space Plan (Orange County Planning Department, 2004) and further utilized by Cornell University’s Department of Natural Resources in cooperation with the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation’s Hudson River Estuary Program to map large forest patches in the Hudson River Estuary watershed (http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=1ceb36ec78af41d989a323791a4fb30f#overview). The classification includes forest patches that are (1) globally important (>15,000 acres), (2) regionally important (6,000 – 15,000 acres), (3) locally important (2,000 - 6,000 acres), and (4) stepping stone forests (200 – 2,000 acres). For the purpose of this NY state focused effort, we collapsed the first two categories into one class of forests of regional significance.