Central Region Regionally Significant Ecological Areas

This is an analysis of regionally significant Terrestrial and Wetland Ecological Areas in the seven county metropolitan area. Individual forest, grassland and wetland models were integrated to identify and rank the Terrestrial and Wetland Ecological Areas. The scores are determined by examining important ecological attributes of the ecological patches including size, shape, cover type diversity, and adjacent land use. The results represent a probability that the modeled conditions exist in any given area, due to limitations of the data layers. The ecological models were run on a hybrid land cover data layer created from LandSat images, National Wetland Inventory polygons and grassland polygons. Due to the inaccurancies of the LandSat data, the final ecological patches were visually checked using the Met Council's 2000 DOQs.<br/><br/>More information about this project and the methodology used to create the data is available at http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/rsea/index.html