Eastern United States Climate Change Tree Atlas - Suitable habitat for Prunus serotina (black cherry) as measured by importance value (IV)

This dataset represents actual and predicted suitable habitat for Prunus serotina (black cherry, species code 762) in the Eastern United States as measured by importance value based on data obtained from the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) project, current climate conditions, and future climate projections. This summary unit of this dataset is a 20 by 20 kilometer cell. The actual importance value (IV) was calculated based on the number of stems and basal area of a given tree species relative to other tree species on a plot using about 100,000 FIA plots (representing nearly 3 million tree records) in the 37 states within the United States east of the 100th meridian. These importance values were summarized to 20 by 20 kilometer grid cells. Current estimates of IV were obtained from regression tree and regression tree ensemble (using Random Forests) classifiers using 38 environmental variables including measures of current climate conditions. Predictions based on future climate were obtained from applying these classifiers to the environmental variables including projections of future climate conditions derived from the downscaled output of selected general circulation models (HADCM3, PCM, and GFDL) for both low (B1) and high (A1F1) emissions scenarios. The reliability of the predictions for this species is High. For more information about this dataset, please see the Climate Change Tree Atlas web page: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/atlas/tree/tree_atlas.html