Hawaii Habitat Status Map (HabQual)

This layer depicts the status, or degree of disturbance, to plant communities on the main Hawaiian Islands. Several layers were uset to create this version (v 3.4). The original HabQual layer was developed by Jon Price and Jim Jacobi based on the mapped land cover units from the Hawaii GAP analysis program (Gon et al. 2006). This map was revised by combining data on land use and the “Bare” category from the NOAA C-CAP 2005 map (NOAA National Ocean Service Coastal Services Center 2012), and adding road corridors to the heavily disturbed category based on the Tiger Roads layer (United States Census Bureau 2014). Additionally, corrections were made to this version of the map by visually inspecting previously mapped units and comparing them to recent high-resolution imagery including WorldView 2 multi-spectral imagery and to very-high resolution RGB imagery obtained from Pictometry Online (Pictometery International 2014). Changes were made to the map using the program GRID Editor developed by ARIS B.V. (2014) by Jim Jacobi. Latest edits made in September 2014.

The starting raster "Habqual" was developed by Jim Jacobi, USGS PIERC. The bare earth category came from NOAA's CCAP dataset and was used to overwrite the original Habqual dataset for categories 2 & 3 (native and mixed). If Habqual was already distrubed (category = 1), then it was NEVER overwritten as bare earth; instead it remained classified as disturbed. Lastly, the TIGER roads layer was buffered and converted into a raster of category 1 (distrubed). The roads raster was then mosaic'ed on top of Habqual to expand the distrubed class to include roads & adjacent disturbed areas.

This layer has four mapped values: 1 = heavily disturbed areas including agriculture and urban developments; 2 = mixed native-alien dominated plant communities; 3 = native dominated vegetation; and 4 = bare lands or <5% plant cover.