Eastern United States Climate Change Tree Atlas - Suitable habitat for Castanea dentata (American chestnut) as measured by
importance value (IV)
Dataset Identification:
Resource Abstract:
This dataset represents actual and predicted suitable habitat for Castanea dentata (American chestnut, species code 421) as
measured by importance value based on data obtained from the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) project, current climate
conditions, and future climate projections. This summary unit of this dataset is a 20 by 20 kilometer cell. The actual importance
value (IV) was calculated based on the number of stems and basal area of a given tree species relative to other tree species
on a plot using about 100,000 FIA plots (representing nearly 3 million tree records) in the 37 states within the United States
east of the 100th meridian. These importance values were summarized to 20 by 20 kilometer grid cells. Current estimates of
IV were obtained from regression tree and regression tree ensemble (using Random Forests) classifiers using 38 environmental
variables including measures of current climate conditions. Predictions based on future climate were obtained from applying
these classifiers to the environmental variables including projections of future climate conditions derived from the downscaled
output of selected general circulation models (HADCM3, PCM, and GFDL) for both low (B1) and high (A1F1) emissions scenarios.
The reliability of the predictions for this species is Medium. For more information about this dataset, please see the Climate
Change Tree Atlas web page: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/atlas/tree/tree_atlas.html
Citation
Title Eastern United States Climate Change Tree Atlas - Suitable habitat for Castanea dentata (American chestnut) as measured by
importance value (IV)