Thursday, September 23, 2010

Vegetation Characterization Products Now Available for Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and El Morro National Monument

USGS-National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Characterization Program (VCP) documentation for Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and El Morro 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  Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and El Morro 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 sixty-one 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.

(Photos: Top left - Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, lower right - El Morro National Monument.  Credit: USGS Vegetation Characterization website.)

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