US Forest Service - FIA Forest Types (Generalized) of the Southeastern United States

This dataset portrays 61 forest group types across the southeastern United States. These data were derived from a product created by the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program and the Remote Sensing Applications Center (RSAC).  The original dataset (accessible from the US Forest Service Website) consists of 141 forest types across the contiguous United States.

The original dataset was downloaded on 12/13/2013, clipped to the southeastern states,  and used in a generalization procedure which involved the application of a majority filter (8 neighbors, half replacement threshold) followed by a sieving process which removed pixels in groups of four or less by reassigning them to their nearest neighbor value.


Abstract:

This dataset portrays 141 forest types across the contiguous United States. These data were derived from MODIS composite images from the 2002 and 2003 growing seasons in combination with nearly 100 other geospatial data layers, including elevation, slope, aspect, ecoregions, and PRISM climate data. The dataset was developed as a collaborative effort between the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis and Forest Health Monitoring programs and the USFS Remote Sensing Applications Center.

Purpose:

The purpose of this dataset is to portray broad distribution patterns of forest cover in the United States and provide input to national scale modeling projects. The data should not be displayed at scales smaller than 1:2,000,000. Independent accuracy assessments were conducted using a 10% holdout of the training data, and are available through the data source contact.

Complete metadata is available on the USFS website in HTML format.