Early successional forest and land cover geospatial data of the upper Midwest

These geospatial data portray early successional forest (ESF) and other land cover in Michigan, Wisconsin, and most of Minnesota. Forest canopy disturbance between 1990 and 2009 was mapped using 42 Landsat time series stacks (LTSS) and a modified version of the vegetation change tracker algorithm (VCTw). Corresponding winter imagery was used to reduce commission errors of forest disturbance in densely vegetated nonforest tracts by identifying areas of persistent snow cover and assigning those areas to nonforest class. The resulting disturbance age map was classed into four 5-year age classes and persisting cover classes, then used to attribute age to forested pixels within the National Land Cover Database of 2011 (NLCD2011). Additional post processing was conducted to reduce misregistration, and a minimum mapping unit of 4 30-meter pixels was applied to comply with the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) definition of forest. A small percentage of NLCD2011 Shrub/Scrub and Grassland/Herbaceous pixels were also reclassified as forest based on VCTw data (see processing steps).
These data were produced to identify early successional forest for wildlife habitat analyses at a regional scale. Other possible uses include coarse scale analysis of regional or statewide forest change and succession monitoring, erosion and water quality modeling, carbon accounting, forest fragmentation monitoring, and land management planning.
Original metadata dates was 01/14/2016. On 04/07/2016 the layer file was slightly modified by updating a path which now points to a relative location so that it works for all users, and the metadata updated accordingly. Minor metadata updates on 12/19/2016 and 04/12/2019.