Potential grassland locations of the eastern United States

This data publication contains a raster digital file of modeled potential grassland locations of the eastern United States, with the 2016 land cover for these locations. Historically, grasslands with limited tree presence were embedded in a matrix of open oak and pine forests in the eastern United States. These ecosystems mostly have been lost to other land uses and closed forests under fire exclusion. The location of the potential extent of eastern grasslands was obtained by applying the random forests and C5.0 classifiers to determine the relationship between topography and wind speed, which are proxies for surface fire frequency, and mapped areas likely to have been grasslands historically. A generalized ruleset was that grasslands occurred at topographic roughness values less than 95 and wind speeds ≥ 3.4 meters per second, which created large fire compartments.
Provides a map of potential grassland locations for the eastern United States.
These data were originally published on 09/28/2021. Metadata was updated on 06/07/2022 to include reference to newly published article. For more information about these data, see Hanberry and Noss (2022).