This dataset is a component of a complete package of products from the Connect the Connecticut project. Connect the Connecticut is a collaborative effort to identify shared priorities for conserving the Connecticut River Watershed for future generations, considering the value of fish and wildlife species and the natural ecosystems they inhabit. Click here to download the full data package, including all documentation.
Specifically, in the Northeast, sites are compared with other sites of the same geophysical setting based on geology, elevation zone, and ecoregion. Within each geophysical setting class, sites are compared with respect to two metrics: 1) landscape diversity, which refers to the number of microhabitats and climatic gradients available within a given area based on the variety of landforms, elevation range, and wetland density, and 2) local connectedness, which refers to the accessibility of neighboring natural areas. In the layer provided here, the raw resiliency index is (quantile) scaled by geophysical setting class and HUC6 watershed so that the poorest cell of each geophysical setting gets a 0 and the best gets a 1 within each watershed. This form of scaling has an intuitive interpretation, because the value of the index expresses the proportion of cells in the same geophysical setting and watershed with a value less than or equal to that value
This dataset represents a scaled version of the terrestrial resiliency index developed by Mark Anderson and associates at The Nature Conservancy (Anderson et al 2012), which is a measure of the relative long-term resiliency of a site based on connectivity to a diversity of landforms, elevations and wetlands. . Thus, a value of 0.9 in a cell means that it has a resiliency score that is greater than 90% of all the cells of the same geophysical setting in that watershed, and all the cells with >0.9 values comprise the best 10% of all cells across all geophysical settings within the watershed. TNC’s resiliency index, as scaled here, is a major component of the terrestrial core area selection index and thus the terrestrial core area network. To learn more about TNC’s resiliency index, see: Resiliency page at TNC’s Conservation Gateway.
