What are cores/intact habitat areas? How did you create them?

Cores, also referred to as “intact habitat areas,” are undisturbed land areas at least 100 acres in size and at least 200 meters wide. They were derived using a combination of the National Land Cover Database (2011) and the US Census Bureau’s TIGER files roads and railroads. Paved roads and railways are considered to be fragmenting features, as are developed and agricultural areas. We followed a methodology published by the Green Infrastructure Center, Inc., which can be found here. The tools and data we used to create cores can be found here. Our hope is that you have great local data to use in place of the national datasets to recreate intact habitat cores in a local region.

How current is the data?

With the exception of the National Soils data set, all source data was collected and released no later than 2010. The National Soils data set has been assembled over the last 100 years. Please refer to this page and use the “See the Source Data” link for more information about each data set.

Where did the data come from?

The data came from a combination of publicly available and contributed data sources. Please refer to this and use the “See the Source Data” link.