Critical Habitat for Threatened and Endangered Species - Plants (Western US)

These data identify the areas where final critical habitat has been mapped by the USFWS for plant species in the western United States. These data were compiled by the Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) from a series of individual shapefiles published by the USFWS (http://criticalhabitat.fws.gov/). For more information on the process for mapping the critical habitat for each species, please see the metadata for each species listed on the USFWS web site. Critical habitat designations have not been made for all listed endangered species. Where critical habitat has been mapped, this dataset only contains those species for which GIS datasets have been made publicly available. Other critical habitat maps exist for some species in non-GIS formats only, and are therefore not represented within this dataset. These data are to be considered approximate only, and should not be used for legal purposes. For legal use, please refer to the Federal Register documents for each species (see http://criticalhabitat.fws.gov/). Some discrepancies, including spelling errors and omissions, were encountered during processing of species common and scientific names. To the degree possible, names were correctly aligned with their representation within the USDA Plants Database (http://plants.usda.gov/). Data in this file represent available data through April 2008.