National Park Service
Date of this Version
2011
Citation
Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve Vegetation Mapping Project, 2011
34.3 x 45.93-inch poster
Abstract
The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve encompasses 10,894 acres in eastern Kansas, just north of Strong City. This park unit was created on November 12, 1996, and is the first to protect a nationally significant example of the once vast tall grass prairie ecosystem. Of the 400,000 square miles of tall grass prairie that once covered the North American continent, less than four percent remains, prin1arily in the Flint Hills. The park unit is primarily rocky upland prairies and deep-soiled prairies in the lowlands. It also contains some wet prairie ravines, riparian forests and some former cropland and restored prairie. These plant communities and other features are mapped below. The project is part of the Inventory and Monitoring Program of the National Park Service that provides park rangers with critical information on natural resources. A long-term goal of this program is to provide baseline inventories of the biological and geophysical resources for all natural resource parks.
Using GIS software and incorporating aerial photography and satellite data, the authors determined and mapped the 12 vegetation and mapping classes based on the National Vegetation Classification System.
This project was conducted by Kelly Kindscher, Hayley Kilroy, Jennifer Delisle, Quinn Long, Hillary Loring, and Kevin Dobbs of the Kansas Biological Survey, and Jim Drake of NatureServe. A peer-reviewed report that provides details on this mapping project and the plant communities is available at: http://web.ku.edu/~kindscher/tallgrass and in this repository.
Description: Large color graphic poster of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve Vegetation Mapping Project.
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Comments
United States government work. Public domain material.