Natural Assets is an input of the Midwest Landscape Initiative’s (MLI) 2023 Midwest Conservation Blueprint. The Blueprint is a basemap of priority lands and waters for conservation across the Midwest consisting of over 20 social and environmental values representing diverse interests across society. For our low-resolution indicators, we use this layer to emphasize natural assets within the indicator data. Any dataset with a coarser resolution than 30m pixels was considered to be low-resolution. This input layer originates from the LANDFIRE Existing Vegetation Type layer, the National Conservation Easement Database, and the Protected Areas Database. To create this layer, MLI partners, members, and staff completed the following mapping steps: projected all input data to NAD83 (2011) UTM Zone 15N, extracted all natural landcover from LANDFIRE (excluding developed and agricultural pixels), extracted all PAD-US polygons with a Gap Status of 1-3, and utilized the Sustainable Land Use Systems indicator raster to represent conservation easements. We converted the selected PAD-US polygons to a 30m raster and mosaicked all rasters together to create a single binary raster with the following values: 1 – natural landcover, PAD-US protected lands, or conservation easement lands, NoData – not a natural asset. For full mapping details, please refer to the Midwest Conservation Blueprint 2023 Development Process document.
