Description: Land cover has an important influence on watersheds and the Great Lakes. When performing land cover related analyses on the Great Lakes, it is important to utilize cohesive data across the entire basin for both the U.S. and Canada. However, the Province of Ontario and the U.S. utilize different classification systems for land cover datasets. We created a crosswalked data layer that includes similar categories across the basin and provides a snapshot of land cover from 2011/2012, which also includes data from 2000 due to data availability constraints. This layer was meant to be used in conjunction with the GLAHF 2001/2000 landcover crosswalk to evaluate change over time across the Great Lakes Basin. The Ontario data sources were: 1) the 29 class 2000 Provincial Landcover Ontario (PLO); and, 2) the 30 class 2012 Southern Ontario Land Resrouce Information System (SOLRIS) v2.0 landcover. The PLO covers Northern Ontario and SOLRIS v2.0 covers Southern Ontario. Both data layers can be downloaded from the Land Information Ontario (LIO) Metadata Management Tool: https://www.javacoeapp.lrc.gov.on.ca/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home. The U.S. data source was the 2011 United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Landcover Dataset, 2011 edition. This layer contains 8 level one classes and 16 nested level two classes and can be downloaded from the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC): http://www.mrlc.gov/nlcd01_data.php. For our crosswalk, we selected the NLCD 11 (2011 version) and the Canadian SOLRIS 2.0 because they were created from imagery collected in approximately the same time frames, and because they were comparable to the 2001 NLCD and the 2000 SOLRIS v1.2. However, a comparable layer from the same time period was not available for Northern Ontario. While the 2005-2011 Far North Land Cover 1.4 was available, it did not cover the entire extent of the 2000 PLO, and the classification scheme was very different from the 2000 PLO. This made it difficult to compare the two datasets as there were large differences in the distribution of classes due to classification scheme and mapping differences, resulting in artificially high land cover change statistics (see Far North Land Cover Data Specifications Version 1.4, November 2014, available at: https://www.sse.gov.on.ca/sites/MNR-PublicDocs/EN/CMID/Far%20North%20Land%20Cover%20-%20Data%20Specification.pdf). At this time, we have incorporated the 2000 PLO for Northern Ontario, but will reevaluate the crosswalk as new data as it becomes available. To process the data, we first clipped each input data layer by the extent of the Great Lakes States and the Province of Ontario. Next, we reclassified the raster values using the Reclassify tool, changing the original values to crosswalked values. Next we projected the data into the standardized projection used by the Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework (GLAHF) USA Contiguous Albers Equal Area Conic USGS projection and resampled the pixel size to 30 meters, the standard projection and pixel size for the Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework (GLAHF). We then created a mosaic using Mosaic to New Raster, incorporating the waters of the Great Lakes as the value “1”, using the shoreline of the watersheds in the GLAHF Hydrology Data Package V1 as a mask.Landcover Codes:1 = Great Lakes Waters11 = Water2 = Developed31 = Barren Land41 = Deciduous Forest42 = Evergreen Forest43 = Evergreen Forest43 = Mixed Forest52 = Scrub/Shrub71 = Grassland/Herbaceous8 = Agriculture90 = Forested Wetland95 = Emergent Wetland98 = Other/UndefinedThis dataset was altered to limit its extent to the St. Clair Detroit River System (SCDRS) Initiative Project Area (https://scdrs.org/), which includes the waters of SCDRS as defined by the SCDRS Initiative Project and their contributing watersheds. The SCDRS Initiative defines the waters of SCDRS the area approximately from the southern base of Lake Huron to the western basin of Lake Erie.
Service Item Id: 3a64e2c0989f4cb89277644f9f7c8881
Copyright Text: 1) National Land Cover Dataset, 2011 v11 http://www.mrlc.gov/nlcd01_data.php; 2) The 2000 Provincial Landcover Ontario (PLO) https://www.javacoeapp.lrc.gov.on.ca/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home; 3) 2012 Southern Ontario Land Resrouce Information System (SOLRIS) v 2.0 https://www.javacoeapp.lrc.gov.on.ca/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home; 4) Anderson, J.R., Hardy, E. E., Roach, J.T., Witmer, R. E., 1976. A Land Use and Land Cover Classification System for Use with Remote Sensor Data. United States Department of the Interior. Geological Survey Professional Paper 964. A revision of the land use classification system as presented in U.S. Geological Survey Circular 671. Conversion to Digital 2001. United States Government Printing Office, Washington. 1976.; 5) Hollenhorst, T. P., Johnson, L.B., and Ciborowski, J., 2011. Monitoring land cover change in the Lake Superior Basin. Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management, 14(4):433-442.; 5)Wolter, P.T., Johnston, C. A., Niemi, G.J., 2006. Land Use Land Cover Change in the U.S. Great Lakes Basin 1992 to 2001. Journal of Great Lakes Research. 32:607-628.: 6)The Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework (GLAHF) project has been funded by the Great Lakes Fishery Trust and lead by the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, with partners from Michigan Department of Natural Resources-Institute for Fisheries Research, NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, International Joint Commission, Michigan State University, The Nature Conservancy, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, University of Minnesota-Duluth, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey and many collaborating partners in both the USA and Canada. More information about this project can be found at https://www.glahf.org/
7)This SCDRS work was done as part of a Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) grant awarded to the Office of the Great Lakes (OGL) that provided capacity funding to the Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework (GLAHF) project to provide and support the platform and spatial infrastructure for planning and implementing the SCDRS Initiative softening shoreline and coastal wetland habitat restoration projects.