The Forest Service is a steward of many of our nation's most treasured landscapes, and within those landscapes are resources that people need and want, such as clean air and water, recreational opportunities and forest products. Impacts from increasing climate variability, extreme weather, and other disturbances—along with changing human demands—challenge our ability to ensure that ecosystems are healthy, resilient, and thus more adaptable to changing conditions. The Office of Sustainability and Climate supports national forests and grasslands with the tools, training, and resources they need to build resiliency into their landscapes in the face of a changing climate.
Several datasets that can be found in the Raster Data Warehouse can be downloaded from the links below. Other datasets from OSC can be downloaded from the Research Data Archive.
Dataset:
Extent of coterminous U.S. rangelands
This raster dataset depicts rangelands in the coterminous U.S., including transitional rangelands and small patch-size rangelands. Each 30 meter pixel is assigned a land cover category, including Rangeland, Afforested Rangeland (experiencing encroachment by trees [> 25% tree cover]) and Transitional Rangeland (currently dominated by herbs or shrubs that will likely become forested without management intervention).
Rangeland is land primarily composed of grasses, forbs, or shrubs. This includes lands vegetated naturally or artificially to provide a plant cover managed like native vegetation and does not meet the definition of pasture. The area must be at least 1.0 acre in size and 120.0 feet wide.
Rangeland extent is an important factor for evaluating critical indicators of rangeland sustainability. Rangeland areal extent was determined for the coterminous United States in a geospatial framework by evaluating spatially explicit data from the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools (LANDFIRE) project describing historic and current vegetative composition, average height, and average cover through the viewpoint of the National Resources Inventory (NRI) administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Three types of rangelands were differentiated using the NRI definition encompassing rangelands, afforested rangelands, and transitory rangelands.
This dataset describes annual productivity in the non-forest domain of the coterminous United States. Production data were generated using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the Thematic Mapper Suite from 1984 to 2023 at 250 m2 resolution. This dataset yields estimates of annual production of rangeland vegetation in pounds per acre and should be useful for understanding trends and variability in forage resources anywhere rangelands are common. There is an individual raster for each year included in the study (1984–2023). Separate data are available for the productivity in pounds per acre as well as the z-scores (standard deviations from the mean), available through 2023, which allow for easier comparison of annual relative productivity in coterminous U.S. rangelands. More information about rangeland productivity and the effects of drought are available in this story map.
