The Cooperative Land Cover Map project is a partnership between Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI) and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) to develop an improved statewide land cover map from existing sources and expert review of aerial photography. The project was funded from 2008 – 2010 by the Florida’s State Wildlife Grants program in support of The Florida State Wildlife Action Plan which identified improved habitat mapping as a priority data gap.

The final land cover map includes over 6 million acres derived from local, regional and site-specific sources and 1.4 million acres classified during aerial photo review. The remaining area (32 million acres) consists of Land Use Land Cover data developed by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, St. Johns River Water Management District, Southwest Florida Water Management District and South Florida Water Management District. All data were crosswalked into the Florida Land Cover Classification System.

New statewide data for focal communities consist of 429,700 acres of scrub, 82,400 acres of scrubby flatwoods, 812,200 acres of sandhill, 154,000 acres of dry prairie, 16,600 acres of pine rockland, 19,200 acres of rockland hammock, 1,576,200 million acres of mesic flatwoods, 166,400 acres of upland pine and 40 acres of upland glade.

The Cooperative Land Cover Map will continue to evolve with integration of new and improved source data, revisions by FWC based on SPOT imagery (a State Wildlife Grant project 2010 – 2013), and feedback from users of the data. We are interested in your comments. To provide feedback or obtain information about the project, please contact Amy Knight (850-224-8207 x214).

Downloads

Cooperative Land Cover Map, Version 1: Final Report PDF (2.7 MB)
This report, published July 2010, describes the data sources, methods and limitations of the Cooperative Land Cover Map. The version 1.1 datasets below were updated in August 2010 to include the latest NWFWMD 2006-07 Land Use Land Cover data.

Cooperative Land Cover Map, Version 1.1 GRID (66 MB) | Feature Class Polygons (564 MB)
The statewide Cooperative Land Cover Map, Version 1.1 is available either as a ESRI 15m GRID or as a File Geodatabase Feature Class. Note that the feature class download may be slow due to its large size.

Focal Natural Communities, CLC v.1.1 Shapefile (93 MB)
This is a shapefile of the statewide extent of nine focal communities: scrub, scrubby flatwoods, sandhill, dry prairie, pine rockland, rockland hammock, mesic flatwoods, upland pine, and upland glade. These data are a subset of the statewide Cooperative Land Cover Map. Detailed methods are described in the Cooperative Land Cover Map, Version 1: Final Report.

*A supplementary shapefile that identifies the extent of individual data sources that contribute to the map is available upon request.