Data from: Thinking Like a Grassland: Challenges and Opportunities for Biodiversity Conservation in the Great Plains of North America

Conservation planning in the Great Plains often depends on understanding the degree of fragmentation of the various types of grasslands and savannas that historically occurred in this region. To define ecological subregions of the Great Plains, we used a revised version of Kuchler’s (1964) map of the potential natural vegetation of the United States. The map was digitized from the 1979 physiographic regions map produced by the Bureau of Land Management, which added 10 physiognomic types. All analyses are based on data sources specific to the United States; hence, we only analyze the portion of the Great Plains occurring in the United States.We sought to quantify the current amount of rangeland in the US Great Plains converted due to 1) woody plant encroachment; 2) urban, exurban, and other forms of development (e.g., energy infrastructure); and 3) cultivation of cropland. At the time of this analysis, the most contemporary measure of land cover across the United States was the 2011 NLCD (Homer et al. 2015). One limitation of the NLCD is that some grasslands with high rates of productivity, such as herbaceous wetlands or grasslands along riparian zones, are misclassified as cropland. A second limitation is the inability to capture cropland conversion occurring after 2011 (Lark et al. 2015). Beginning in 2009 (and retroactively for 2008), the US Department of Agriculture - NASS has annually produced a Cropland Data Layer (CDL) for the United States from satellite imagery, which maps individual crop types at a 30-m spatial resolution. We used the annual CDLs from 2011 to 2017 to map the distribution of cropland in the Great Plains. We merged this map with the 2011 NLCD to evaluate the degree of fragmentation of grasslands and savannas in the Great Plains as a result of conversion to urban land, cropland, or woodland. We produced two maps of fragmentation (best case and worst case scenarios) that quantify this fragmentation at a 30 x 30 m pixel resolution across the US Great Plains, and make them available for download here.

Resources in this dataset:

• Resource title: Data Dictionary for Figure 2 derived land cover of the US portion of the North American Great Plains File name: Figure2_Key for landcover classes.csv

• Resource title: Figure 1. Potential natural vegetation of US portion of the North American Great Plains, adapted from Kuchler (1964). File name: Figure1_Kuchler_GPRangelands.zip Resource description: Extracted grassland, shrubland, savanna, and forest communities in the US Great Plains from the revised Kuchler natural vegetation map

• Resource title: Figure 2. Derived land cover of the US portion of the North American Great Plains. File name: Figure2_Key for landcover classes.zip Resource description: The fNLCD-CDL product estimates that 43.7% of the Great Plains still consists of grasslands and shrublands, with the remainder consisting of 40.6% cropland, 4.4% forests, 3.0% UGC, 3.0% developed open space, 2.9% improved pasture or hay fields, 1.2% developed land, 1.0% water, and 0.2% barren land, with important regional and subregional variation in the extent of rangeland loss to cropland, forests, and developed land.

• Resource title: Figure 3. Variation in the degree of fragmentation of Great Plains measured in terms of distance to cropland, forest, or developed lands. File name: Figure3_bestcase_disttofrag.zip Resource description: This map depicts a “best case” scenario in which 1) croplands are mapped based only on the US Department of AgricultureNational Agricultural Statistics Service Cropland Data Layers (2011e2017), 2) all grass-dominated cover types including hay fields and improved pasture are considered rangelands, and 3) developed open space (as defined by the National Land Cover Database) are assumed to not be a fragmenting land cover type.

• Resource title: Figure 4. Variation in the degree of fragmentation of Great Plains measured in terms of distances to cropland, forest, or developed lands. File name: Figure4_worstcase_disttofrag.zip Resource description: This map depicts a ‘worst case’ scenario in which 1) croplands are mapped based on the US Department of AgricultureNational Agricultural Statistics Service Cropland Data Layers (2011e2017) and the 2011 National Land Cover Database (NLCD), 2) hay fields and improved pasture are not included as rangelands, and 3) developed open space (as defined by NLCD) is included as a fragmenting land cover type.