Terrestrial core tiers

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This layer shows the top 2 tiers, plus additional supporting landscape area. Tier 1 is a highly strategic selection of land that targets the best, highest priority areas on the landscape, which are represented as core areas (25% of the watershed). Tier 2 core areas also encompass important ecosystems and habitat but are not as high priority as Tier 1 core areas; they represent an additional 25% of the landscape. Areas in the supporting landscape are the road-bounded blocks containing the Tier 1 and 2 cores, in which all road classes except tracks and medium-to-high intensity development function as boundaries (an additional 27% of the landscape). This supporting landscape is intended to represent more practical on-the-ground conservation units necessary to ensure maintenance of the ecological values of the Tier 1 and 2 cores in the future.

Two associated files (tCoreEcoSum.csv and tCoreSpeciesSum.csv) provide details on the makeup of each individual core area. The tCoreEcoSum csv reports the total area of each ecological system that makes up a given core, as well as other statistics related to the relative importance of a given core in terms of ecosystems, are available in the csv. The tCoreSpeciesSum csv reports, for each representative species, statistics about the representation of each of the 14 modeled species on the landscape and within the tiers.

View this product as a web map on Data Basin.

Access this data as a GIS download from the North Atlantic LCC website. 

Read the Technical Abstract for this data layer (tCoreTiers.shp).