Clone of Digital Representations of Tree Species Range Maps from "Atlas of United States Trees" by Elbert L. Little, Jr. (and other publications)

This repository contains a clone of the shapefiles and metadata for tree species ranges in the United States that were formerly available from the USGS at https://gec.cr.usgs.gov/data/little/. The data were removed in the spring/summer of 2017.

The source data for this repo come from an archived copy of the website from 27 January 2017 available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20170127093428/https://gec.cr.usgs.gov/data/little/

PDFs of the range maps are not available in this repo, but may be found on the archived website.

Zipped shapefiles were unzipped and grouped into subfolders in the SHP/ directory following the original file naming convention.

SHP projection information (see Metadata.shtml for more information):

• Horizontal_Datum_Name: North American Datum of 1927
• Ellipsoid_Name: Clarke 1866
• Semi-major_Axis: 6378206.4
• Denominator_of_Flattening_Ratio: 294.98
• EPSG:4267 (https://epsg.io/4267)

UPDATE

I emailed Peter Schweitzer (USGS), the designated contact on the metadata, on 29 August 2017. As part of his reply, he included a response to another user's query:

We have discontinued serving the Elbert Little tree species maps. We refer queries by users the following sources for newer data:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/archive/Product/RDS-2013-0013

https://www.fs.fed.us/nrs/atlas/littlefia/

Our decision to stop serving the Little maps was threefold: 1) because reorganization of our web space made it more difficult to continue hosting the maps; 2) it has been pointed out to me that there are digitizing errors in some of the shapefiles - I don't know which ones, and we don't have the resources or need, frankly, to correct them; and 3) we were made aware that the Forest Service is employing newer methodologies for quantifying and mapping tree species distribution, and we defer to them as experts in the field.

Species list

Note that the pattern for filename is generally the first four letters of the genus and species epithet. In the case of name collisions and other deviations, the filename used in the original database is given with an asterisk (*).