In recognition of the need for landscape-scale planning to address the conservation challenges of the Midwestern United States, the Midwest Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies passed a resolution endorsing the Midwest Landscape Initiative, a collaborative that identifies shared conservation priorities and develops solutions for healthy, functioning ecosystems in the Midwest (MAFWA 2019). To address these goals the Midwest Landscape Initiative identified an opportunity to create a regional terrestrial habitat system that could provide consistent and structured description of natural and cultural habitats across the region. The regional habitat data aids partners by providing a common lexicon through which conservation planning for priority habitats can be communicated and coordinated across states and geographies.
The Midwest Terrestrial Habitat System (MWTHS) represents the distribution of a hierarchical classification of natural and cultural vegetation and landcover types. The MWTHS is derived from data that was initially modeled by LANDFIRE Consortium using AI methods and remote sensing to predict ecological systems (LANDFIRE 2016). NatureServe then cross walked the natural systems to the National Vegetation Classification (NVC) while also making additional spatial improvements to the current version (0.92) of the map (NatureServe, unpublished data). The MWTHS currently uses NatureServe’s v0.92 map but, also includes the cultural habitats, originally specified by LANDFIRE. Three levels of the NVC classification are identified in the MWTHS: at the finest levels are NVC groups, then macrogroups, and finally divisions. Additionally, the MWTHS also incorporates current coordination between NatureServe and Midwestern states to cross walk NVC groups with each state’s heritage vegetation classes (note: Kansas uses NVC classifications as their state heritage system, so Kansas did not require a cross walk and is not included as a separate column in the raster attribute table). Therefore, for each mapped group in the MWTHS viewers can explore the state heritage vegetation classes that overlap and vice versa.
