Data Products ›› LANDFIRE National Product Descriptions

Biophysical Settings

The Biophysical Settings (BpS) layer represents the vegetation that may have been dominant on the landscape prior to Euro-American settlement and is based on both the current biophysical environment and an approximation of the historical disturbance regime. It is a refinement of the Environmental Site Potential layer; in this refinement, we attempt to incorporate current scientific knowledge regarding the functioning of ecological processes - such as fire - in the centuries preceding non-indigenous human influence. Map units are based on NatureServe's Ecological Systems classification, which is a nationally consistent set of mid-scale ecological units (Comer and others 2003). LANDFIRE's use of these classification units to describe biophysical settings differs from their intended use as units of existing vegetation. As used in LANDFIRE, map unit names represent the natural plant communities that may have been present during the reference period. Each BpS map unit is matched with a model of vegetation succession, and both serve as key inputs to the LANDSUM landscape succession model (Keane and others 2002). The LANDFIRE BpS concept is similar to the concept of potential natural vegetation groups used in mapping and modeling efforts related to fire regime condition class (Schmidt and others 2002; www.frcc.gov).

Click here for instructions on how to link to Ecological Systems descriptions for LANDFIRE vegetation map product legends.

Click here for complete conterminous U.S. metadata.
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Comer, P., D. Faber-Langendoen, R. Evans, S. Gawler, C. Josse, G. Kittel, S. Menard, M. Pyne, M. Reid, K. Schulz, K. Snow, and J. Teague. 2003. Ecological Systems of the United States: A Working Classification of U.S. Terrestrial Systems. NatureServe, Arlington, VA. 75 p.

Keane, R. E., R. Parsons, and P. Hessburg. 2002. Estimating historical range and variation of landscape patch dynamics: limitations of the simulation approach. Ecological Modeling 151:29-49.

Schmidt, K. M., J. P. Menakis, C. C. Hardy, W. J. Hann, and D. L. Bunnell. 2002. Development of coarse-scale spatial data for wildland fire and fuel management. General Technical Report, RMRS-GTR-87, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research station, Fort Collins, CO. 46 p.