Note that the data published in the 2002 State of the Nation’s Ecosystems Report as well as the 2003 and 2005 Web-Only Updates have been superseded by the 2008 Report and thus should be used with caution. For the most recent data, purchase the 2008 Report from Island Press.

The Data Gap

As discussed on the indicator page, it is not yet clear if this indicator will utilize data collected “on-the-ground” or via remote sensing. Use of satellite data would require acquisition of vegetation data, perhaps at a resolution finer than that provided by the National Land Cover Data Set (NLCD), which has 30-m resolution (see http://www.epa.gov/mrlc/ and the National Extent technical note for more detail). It will also be necessary to decide how to characterize vegetation, which would probably be based on the ecological functioning of the cover. For example, residential lawns function differently from woods or natural grasslands in the way they shed water, passively clean stormwater runoff or provide habitat for stream-dependent animals. Secondly, the vegetation data would have to be merged with data on the location of streams (probably from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset (NHD), see http://nhd.usgs.gov/). Stream location would have to be limited to those segments that are urban/suburban in nature, which might be achieved by simply restricting the dataset to those stream and river segments that are within the urban and suburban areas defined by this project (see the Area of Urban / Suburban Lands).