GAP/LANDFIRE National Terrestrial Ecosystems 2011

The GAP/LANDFIRE National Terrestrial Ecosystems represents a highly thematically detailed land cover map of the U.S. The GAP/LANDFIRE National Terrestrial Ecosystems dataset is produced by the U.S. Geological Survey in collaboration with the LANDFIRE Program. The GAP and LANDFIRE produce data and tools that help meet critical national challenges such as biodiversity conservation, fire and fuels modeling, renewable energy development, climate change adaptation, and infrastructure investment. The GAP National Terrestrial Ecosystems - Ver 3.0 is a 2011 update of the National Gap Analysis Program Land Cover Data - Version 2.2 for the conterminous U.S. The map legend includes types described by NatureServe's Ecological Systems Classification (Comer et al. 2002) as well as land use classes described in the National Land Cover Dataset 2011 (Homer et al. 2015). These data cover the entire continental U.S. and are a spatially continuous data layer. These raster data have a 30 m x 30 m cell resolution. National GAP Land Cover combines ecological system data from previous GAP projects in the Southwest , Southeast, and Northwest United States with recently updated California data. For Alaska and areas of the continental United States where ecological system-level GAP data has not yet been developed, data from the LANDFIRE project were used. This approach allowed GAP mappers to construct a seamless representation of ecological system distributions across the conterminous United States. Currently LANDFIRE is leading a remap effort based on 2016 Landsat imagery as well as new field data. In addition to the Ecological Systems Classification maps can be rendered using the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s National Vegetation Classification System at the Group level and higher.