Vegetation Characterization Products Now Available for Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and Grand Portage National Monument

USGS-National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Characterization Program (VCP) documentation for Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and Grand Portage National Monument has been completed and is available on the VCP Web site. Products include aerial photography - flight line, graphic of orthophoto mosaic, and spatial orthophoto data; project report - photointerpretation key, vegetation descriptions, vegetation key, photos of map class, and accuracy assessment; field data - graphic of field plots, field plots database, physical descriptive for plots, and species list for plots; geospatial vegetation information - graphics of vegetation communities, geodatabase, and plot and AA photos; accuracy assessment information - graphic of accuracy assessment points, and contingency matrix; metadata, and a link to NPS information about  Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and Grand Portage National Monument. The goal of the VCP is to classify and map the vegetation communities of National Parks that have a natural resource component. Complete documentation is currently available for ninety park units and two U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuge units. The VCP is managed by the USGS Center for Biological Informatics in cooperation with the NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program. The USGS Vegetation Characterization effort includes the management and upkeep of the VCP protocols, Web-based access to the standards, and the Web-based access to NPS Vegetation Characterization program finished products.

(Photo: Apostle Islands National Lakeshore is located in the northern-most lands of Wisconsin, on the south shore of Lake Superior, about 19 km of the northwest shores of the Bayfield Peninsula, and comprises an area of 28,074 ha.Photo courtesy of the USGS Vegetation Characterization website.)