Riparian species vegetation classification data for the Colorado River within Grand Canyon derived from 2013 airborne imagery

These data are a species-level classification map of riparian vegetation in the Colorado River riparian corridor in Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA. The classification is derived from 0.2 m pixel resolution multispectral aerial imagery acquired in May 2013. The classification spans the riparian zone of the river corridor between Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona, and Lake Mead at Pearce Ferry, Arizona. The classification is divided into 5 distinct reaches of the river: Glen Canyon, Marble Canyon, Eastern Grand Canyon, Western Grand Canyon upstream of Diamond Creek, and Western Grand Canyon downstream of Diamond Creek. The method used for classification was a combination of supervised Classification And Regression Tree (CART) analysis and unsupervised ISODATA classification. The data release package contains the individual raster data of riparian species vegetation classification data based on USGS 1:24000 quad boundaries, and tabular data of training and validation point locations, confusion matrix counts as accuracy assessment and National Vegetation Classification (NVC) standard and vegetation classification descriptions. Two FGDC metadata files are included; one for the raster classification data and one for the tabular data.