This is a 30 meter grid that maps upland and wetland wildlife habitats/ecological systems for the Northeastern US, including all 13 states from Maine to Virginia, west to New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and for the Maritime provinces of Canada (Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick) and southeastern Quebec. Mapped habitat types are drawn from the Northeastern Terrestrial Habitat Classification System (NETHCS) and from some ecological system types identifed by Canadian ecologists as being unique to Canada. The NETHCS is based on NatureServe’s Ecological Systems Classification, augmented with additional information from individual state wildlife classifications and other information specific to wildlife managers. A terrestrial ecological system is defined as a mosaic of plant community types that tend to co-occur within landscapes with similar ecological processes, substrates, and/or environmental gradients, in a pattern that repeats itself across landscapes. Systems occur at various scales, from “matrix” forested systems of thousands of hectares to small patch systems, such as cliffs, basin wetlands, or barrens on a particular bedrock type, of a hectare or 2.
This project was co-funded by the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative and Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Centers. An alternate reference to this product can be found here: https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item//564b7daee4b0ebfbef0d3291.
