Vegetation - Lassen Volcanic National Park [ds2959]

The Director of the NPS approved the Natural Resource Challenge in 1999 to encourage national parks to focus on the preservation of the nation’s natural heritage through science, natural resource inventories, and expanded resource monitoring. The Natural Resource Challenge provided funding for 12 baseline inventories to be completed in each of 270 parks with significant natural resources including vegetation mapping inventory. The Vegetation Inventory is an effort by the NPS to classify, describe, and map vegetation communities that follows well-established procedures that are compatible with other agencies and organizations. The inventory uses the USNVC, a system that is integrated with the major scientific efforts in the taxonomic classification of vegetation, and is a FGDC standard. Maps are produced in Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates (NAD 83) with a 1:24,000 scale and a minimum mapping unit of 0.5 hectares. The vegetation maps must meet the National Map Accuracy Standards for positional accuracy, and the minimum class accuracy goal across all vegetation and land cover classes of 80%. Report available from: https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2244126. The photographic interpretation was based on 1:15,840-scale true-color aerial photography (prints and transparencies) acquired in July and August 2004. The interpreted overlays were orthorectified along with the scanned aerial photography and vectorized using Arc/Info™ (ESRI, Inc.) software. The photointerpreted mapped 26 vegetation classes and seven non-vegetated classes with an overall proportion correct of 72% (based on the most liberal of three accuracy thresholds).