USGS - eco_4_Ecosystems - Terrestrial Ecosystems

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) modeled the distribution of terrestrial ecosystems for the contiguous United States using a standardized, deductive approach to associate unique physical environments with ecological systems characterized in NatureServe's Ecological Systems of the United States classification (Comer et al., 2003). This approach was first developed for South America (Sayre et al., 2008) and is now being implemented globally (Sayre et al., 2007).



Unique physical environments were delineated from a massive biophysical stratification of the nation into the major structural components of ecosystems: biogeographic regions (Cress et al., 2008c), land surface forms (Cress et al., 2008a), surficial lithology (Cress et al., 2008d), and topographic moisture potential (Cress et al., 2008b). Each of these structural components was mapped for the contiguous United States and then spatially combined to produce ecosystem structural footprints which represented unique abiotic (physical) environments. Among 49,168 unique structural footprint classes, 13,482 classes which met a minimum pixel count threshold (20,000 pixels) were aggregated into 432 NatureServe ecosystems through semi-automated labeling process using rule set formulations for attribution of each ecosystem.

Simple

Date (Publication)
2008-10-15T00:00:00
Edition

http://localhost:8080/demodem/editioin

Status
On going
Point of contact
Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role

USGS Rocky Mountain Geographic Science Center

Jill Cress

jjcress@usgs.gov

Principal investigator
Maintenance and update frequency
As needed
Theme

  • Terrestrial Ecosystem

  • Geospatial mapping

  • Biogeography
Place

  • World
Access constraints
Copyright
Use constraints
otherRestictions
Spatial representation type
Vector
Language
English
Character set
UTF8
Topic category
  • Boundaries
N
S
E
W
thumbnail




Reference system identifier
WGS 1984
Distribution format
Name Version

OGC:OWS-C

1
OnLine resource
Protocol Linkage Name

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

 		http://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/arcgis/rest/services/ecosys_US/MapServer

ecosys_US (MapServer)

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

 		http://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/outgoing/ecosystems/USdata/ USGS Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center (GECSC) Outgoing Datasets

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

 		http://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/ecosystems/

USGS Global Ecosystems page

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

 		http://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/ecosystems/docs/us_ecosystems_30m_dd83.htm#1

Terrestrial Ecosystems

WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

 		http://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/arcgis/rest/services/ecosys_US/MapServer/0

Layer: Ecosystems (ID: 0)
Hierarchy level
Dataset
Source

Metadata

File identifier
91bc7590-b8de-4fb5-a5bf-e88ba4cd28c7 XML
Metadata language
English
Character set
UTF8
Date stamp
2016-06-08T13:02:22
Metadata standard name

ISO 19115:2003/19139
Metadata standard version

1.0
Metadata author
Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role

USDA/ARS/NAL > National Agricultural Library, Agricultural Research Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture

Erin Antognoli

erin.antognoli@ars.usda.gov

Point of contact
 
 

Overviews

overview
Thumbnail in PNG format from USGS WMS server GetMap request
overview
thumbnail
overview
large_thumbnail

Spatial extent

N
S
E
W
thumbnail




Keywords

Biogeography Geospatial mapping Terrestrial Ecosystem


Provided by

Associated resources

Not available