Classifying Northern New England Landscapes for Improved Conservation

Abstract

• Ecological land classification enables improved conservation by linking land types to vegetation, ecosystem services, disturbance regimes, and conservation practices.
• Defining landscape-scale ecological site groups allows for the development of generalized state-and-transition models for summarizing the major ecological dynamics and associated conservation practices within a region.
• Wedefinednine ecological sitegroups for northernNew England(MLRA143)by identifying the fewest number of ecological classes as possible while retaining maximum utility of state-and-transition models for each class.
• Ecological site groups provide scalability of ecological site information and simplify the development of ecological concepts and the application of appropriate conservation practices.

Keywords: ecological site, state-and-transition model, ecosystem services plant community, ecological classifications.