Vegetation Characterization Products Now Available for Fort Union National Monument and Great Smoky Mountains National Park

USGS-National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Characterization Program (VCP) documentation for Fort Union National Monument and Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been completed and is available on the VCP Web site. Products include aerial photography - 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 Fort Union National Monument and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 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 seventy-eight 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 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: Image of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Photo courtesy of the USGS-National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Characterization Program website.)