Shrubland vegetation topographic facets of Southern California
Description
To approximate the distribution of shrubland species based on their postfire reproductive strategy (resprouter, seeder, and facultative seeder) across Southern California, we created a raster layer subdividing the landscape into a number of different facet classes. This raster dataset is at 30 meters pixel resolution and contains 12 different landscape facet classes based on vegetation and physiography. Specifically, the facets included several different vegetation types based on the California Wildlife Habitat Relations (WHR) classification (three shrubland categories, annual grasslands, valley-foothill riparian woodland, and 'other' vegetation types) which were intersected with aspect (two classes: north or south facing) and topography (summit, ridges, slopes, valleys, flats, and depressions). The combination of factors is intended to capture warmer, more exposed vegetation types dominated by seeder species (occurring on south-facing slopes, summits and ridges) versus cooler, less exposed vegetation types associated with resprouter species (occurring on north-facing slopes, valleys, depressions, and flats).
The dataset is a key input into a tool developed for resource managers to aid in the prioritization of restoration activities in shrublands postfire. The tool is available at https://github.com/adhollander/postfire and described in the following technical guide:
Underwood, Emma C., and Allan D. Hollander. 2019. "Post-Fire Restoration Prioritization for Chaparral Shrublands Technical Guide." https://github.com/adhollander/postfire/blob/master/Postfire_Restoration_Priorization_Tool_Technical_Guide.pdf
Notes
The primary file in this dataset is named SoCal_Veg_Topo_Facets.tif. It is a raster GIS file in geotiff format with 30 meter resolution. The projection for it is California Albers, NAD83 datum (EPSG:3310). Dimensions of the raster are 22748 rows x 15223 columns, and the bounding box x,y coordinates in the California Albers projection are -235440.000, -156780.000 (upper left) and 447000.000, -613470.000 (lower right). The raster is encoded as bytes with a minimum value of 0, a maximum value of 11, and a nodata value of 255.
The values in the raster represent individual facet types that are numbered 0 to 11. The additional file SoCal_Veg_Topo_Facets.tsv is a tab-delimited lookup table giving the class names associated with each raster value.
The study region of the dataset consists of the area of 385 HUC12 USGS watersheds encompassing the four National Forests in Southern California (Angeles, Cleveland, Los Padres, and San Bernardino). A map of the study area is provided with the attached file collection (SoCal_Veg_Topo_Facets_Studyregion.png).
The original use of this dataset is as an input to a geospatial software tool to assist in the prioritization of areas for shrubland restoration postfire (see https://github.com/adhollander/postfire). Other intended users of this dataset might include resource managers, researchers who are carrying out biogeographic studies, and people needing to make estimates of patterns of shrublands and the functional groups of shrubland species across this landscape (e.g., estimating biomass or biomass recovery postfire).
This dataset is made available under a CC0 license.
Funding provided by: U.S. Forest Service
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100006959
Award Number:
Funding provided by: National Fish and Wildlife Foundation
Crossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100007430
Award Number:
Files
SoCal_Veg_Topo_Facets.zip
Files
(7.8 MB)
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Additional details
Related works
- Is derived from
- https://github.com/adhollander/postfire (URL)