Website

https://myfwc.com/research/gis/regional-projects/cooperative-land-cover/

Region(s)

NE, NW, SE, SW

Summary

The Florida Cooperative Land Cover Map (CLC) is a partnership between the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI) to develop ecologically-based statewide land cover from existing sources and expert review of aerial photography. All data are crosswalked into the Florida Land Cover Classification System. The CLC is primarily funded by the Florida’s State Wildlife Grants program in support of The Florida State Wildlife Action Plan which identified improved habitat mapping as a priority data gap. The STATE level is most appropriate when looking at regional or state-wide scales.

Parameters

land cover classes standardized into a CLC code

Notes

Compilation of many sources, see metadata. Version 3.2 published 2016. The Cooperative Land Cover Map is a project to develop an improved statewide land cover map from existing sources and expert review of aerial photography. The STATE (78 classes) attribute represents a more generalized classification of the CLC. Multiple SITE (@234 detailed level) classes will ‘roll into’ a single STATE class. The STATE level is most appropriate when looking at regional or state-wide scales. The CLC can be downloaded here: http://myfwc.com/research/gis/applications/articles/fl-land-cover-classification/ Several CLC versions are available: CLC 3.0 2014; CLC 3.1 2015; CLC 3.2 2016; CLC 3.2.5 (not publicly released) 2017; CLC 3.3, 2018. IMPORTANT: These dates only represent when the version was release, not the on-the-ground landcover conditions for that year. The entire state is not remapped with every version; most of the imagery used for any version is 2 – 5 years old, and the source landcover data for managed areas is typically mapped a year or two prior before being included in a particular version. Additionally, due to limitations in staff resources, only high priority areas are annually or biannually updated with other locations not receiving review. The individual versions do not serve as a proxy for land cover status for a specific year. Instead, each version is a temporal mosaic based on prioritized areas. It is not appropriate to directly compare changes in landcover percentages between the versions, since loss or gain in a class’s acreage is often due to previous classification errors and not an actual change in the class’s extent.

Application

Publications

Available for direct download

Start

2014

End

Current

Frequency

Periodic

Method

The Cooperative Land Cover Map integrates 3 primary data types: 1) 6 million acres are derived from local or site-specific data sources, primarily on existing conservation lands. Most of these sources have a ground-truth or local knowledge component. We collected land cover and vegetation data from 37 existing sources. Each dataset was evaluated for consistency and quality and assigned a confidence category that determined how it was integrated into the final land cover map. 2) 1.4 million acres are derived from areas that FNAI ecologists reviewed with high resolution aerial photograpy. These areas were reviewed because other data indicated some potential for the presence of a focal community: scrub, scrubby flatwoods, sandhill, dry prairie, pine rockland, rockland hammock, upland pine or mesic flatwoods. 3) 3.2 million acres are represented by Florida Land Use Land Cover data from the FL Department of Environmental Protection and Water Management Districts (FLUCCS). The Cooperative Land Cover Map integrates data from the following years: NWFWMD: 2006 - 07 SRWMD: 2005 - 08 SJRWMD: 2004 SFWMD: 2004 SWFWMD: 2008 All data were crosswalked into the Florida Land Cover Classification System.

Discontinuity

Data Location

http://www.myfwc.com/research/gis/applications/articles/Cooperative-Land-Cover

Data Format

Raster or Vector GIS
Available from FWC Center for Spatial Analysis online GIS portal: http://geodata.myfwc.com/

Habitats

Coastal Wetlands

SEACAR Citation

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI). (2021). Florida Cooperative Land Cover (CLC) map. Updated 04/22/2022. Distributed by: SEACAR Data Discovery Interface, Office of Resilience and Coastal Protection, Florida Department of Environmental Protection. https://data.florida-seacar.org/programs/details/4029

Alternative Citation

indicates priority attributes