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USE OF ROAD MAPS IN NATIONAL ASSESSMENTS OF FOREST FRAGMENTATION IN THE UNITED STATES
Citation:
Riitters, K. H., J D. Wickham, AND J. W. Coulston. USE OF ROAD MAPS IN NATIONAL ASSESSMENTS OF FOREST FRAGMENTATION IN THE UNITED STATES. C.S. Holling, Carl Folke, Lance Gunderson, Michelle Lee, Allyson Quinlan (ed.), CONSERVATION ECOLOGY 9(2):13,online, (2005).
Impact/Purpose:
The objective of this task is to produce land-cover and related products that are needed to meet Annual Performance Goals (APG) under GPRA Goals Clean Air, Clean Water, and Healthy and Safe Communities, and to meet the critical needs of EPA Regional Offices.
Description:
Including road-mediated forest fragmentation is a contentious issue in United States national assessments. We compared fragmentation as calculated from national land-cover maps alone, and from land-cover maps in combination with road maps. The increment of forest edge from roads was highest in the Pacific Northwest and Appalachian Mountain regions. Elsewhere, roads were typically associated with sufficient nonforest land-cover that most of the road-mediated fragmentation was already evident on land-cover maps. Over most of the United States, land-cover maps alone accounted for at least 80 percent of forest edge, and depending on the observation scale, 89 to l00 percent of the fragmentation of core forest. Using roads to delineate forest patches caused indices of the number, size, and distance between forest patches to change much more substantially but, in many places, illogically.