Land Use/Landcover Data Sets
The last data category has a loose definition because it involves a wide assortment of data formats and sources. It is beyond the scope of this review to describe all land use/landcover information that may depict some aspect of human activity relevant to pest spread. Instead, the review highlights two main uses of these data. The first purpose is to map areas that have appropriate conditions to sustain forest pests and that, ultimately, may permit them to spread into naturally forested landscapes. These data sets depict areas where a pest is likely to invade a region and have access to at least a few host individuals. A chief example is spatial data depicting the extent and nature of the forest-urban interface in a given region. The second purpose is to find areas of land use/landcover change due to human development. The fragmentation or disturbance of natural forests due to urbanization leads to more chances for forest pest introduction or establishment or both (Chornesky and others 2005). For managing pest risk, it would be preferable to pinpoint areas currently undergoing such changes or facing such changes in the near future. This is a significant challenge, as discussed in the following sections, due to the timeframe at which most land use/landcover data sets are currently collected and published.
- Forest-Developed Interface Data : Landcover maps derived from satellite imagery—such as the U.S. National Land Cover Data—may be analyzed using moving-window functions, to highlight edges between forest and developed landcover types.
- Contemporary Land Use/Landcover Change : The wall-to-wall land use/landcover classification provided by the NLCD is sufficient for many analyses.
Encyclopedia ID: p3038
