Areas with high potential habitat suitability for northern spotted owls in Oregon, USA

This dataset represents areas in Oregon (USA) with potential high suitability for northern spotted owls. This dataset is not intended to accurately characterize high-quality northern spotted owl habitat, but instead serves as a means of distilling the more complex information depicted in the northern spotted owl habitat suitability layers published by the Northwest Forest Plan (NFP) - Interagency Regional Monitoring Program (Lint 2005) used to create this dataset. The Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) developed this layer through a series of post-processing steps. Areas of high suitability (90-100%) were identified in the NFP habitat suitability layer. These areas were then filtered and smoothed using a 125 meter circular radius moving window majority filter. A generalized mature and late seral forest mask was created by selecting mature and old forest from the CBI Oregon Late Seral Forest Classification dataset, and applying a 3x3 square moving window majority filter. The owl high suitability areas were restricted to only fall within the generalized mature and old forest areas. Areas less than 0.1875 hectares, an arbitrary limit, were discarded.