Land and Agriculture – Forested Acres
This indicator displays the percent of total acreage in a county that is forested.
Source
Source Description
The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) consortium is a group of federal agencies who coordinate and generate consistent and relevant land cover information at the national scale for a wide variety of environmental, land management, and modeling applications. The creation of this consortium has resulted in the mapping of the lower 48 United States, Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico into a comprehensive land cover product termed, the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), from decadal Landsat satellite imagery and other supplementary datasets.
Methodology
This indicator utilizes two map layers from USGS. First, areas classified as some type of forest (deciduous, evergreen, or mixed) are extracted using the National Land Cover Dataset. Secondly, from the extracted area, pixels with >= 50% canopy coverage are then extracted from the forested pixels using the Canopy Coverage dataset. The result is the total forested area with >=50% canopy coverage. For each county, the forested area was then divided by total area to determine the forested acres percent.
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