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THE HOLDRIDGE LIFE ZONES OF THE CONTERMINOUS UNITED STATES IN RELATION TO ECOSYSTEM MAPPING
Citation:
Lugo, A. E., S. Brown, R. Dodson, T. S. Smith, AND H. H. Shugart. THE HOLDRIDGE LIFE ZONES OF THE CONTERMINOUS UNITED STATES IN RELATION TO ECOSYSTEM MAPPING. Journal of Biogeography 26:1025-1038, (1999).
Description:
Our main goals were to develop a map of the life zones for the conterminous United States, based on the Holdridge Life Zone system as a tool for ecosystem mapping, and to compare the map of Holdridge life zones with other global vegetation classification and mapping efforts.
The area of interest is the forty-eight contiguous states of the United States.
We wrote a PERL program for determining life zones from climatic data and linked it to the image processing workbench (IPW). The inputs were annual precipitation (Pann), biotemperatures (Tbio), sea-level biotemperature (Tobio), and the frost line. The spatial resolution chosen for this study (2.5 arc-minute for classification, 4-km for mapping) was driven by the availability of current state-of-the-art, accurate and reliable precipitation data. We used the Precipitation-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model, or PRISM, output for the contiguous United States downloaded from the internet. The accepted standard data for air temperature surfaces were obtained from the vegetation/Ecosystem Modelling and Analysis Project (VEMAP). This data set along with station data obtained from the National climatic Data Center for the US, were used to develop all temperature surfaces at the same resolution as the Pann.