Completing the Land Resource Hierarchy

Abstract

• The Land Resource Hierarchy is a useful framework for organizing natural resource information and can provide both insight and explanation while maintaining consistency in terminology, concepts, and interpretations across scales is a challenge.
• While some scales of the Land Resource Hierarchy are well developed, with all land area assigned to quantitatively defined groups, other scales lack organizing concepts, relationships, and definitions that allow for testing and revision.
• Ecological sites and ecological site groups represent distinct scales in the Land Resource Hierarchy framework, so they should be based on appropriate quantitative variables that can be used to define and
communicate their extent and behavior.
Keywords: landscape classification, land resource
hierarchy, ecological site groups, ecological sites, generalized
state-and-transition models, landscape ecology.