Use this application to experiment with weighting different components of Intact Core Habitat scoring. The initial default values show what's generally considered good habitat quality for the southeastern US, according to landscape ecologists and biologists working in that region. Please use caution when drawing conclusions about habitat quality if you modify these values significantly.

Some guidelines on choosing weights and values:

• Generally, large cores that have forest cover, diverse terrain, water elements or wetlands are better than smaller, drier and less physically diverse cores.
• Cores with unique ecological systems (Eco_Redundancy), larger numbers of endemic species (EndemicSpeciesMax) and a higher biodiversity index (BioDiv) are better.
• Soils data (SoilVariety) is not available in some areas of the US. Alternates include ecological land unit diversity (ELU_SWI) and ecologically relevant landform diversity (ERL_SWI).
• A variable of particular interest is (HM_Mean), the mean Human Modification value for a core. This represents traffic volumes and distance from roads, structures, energy developments, and populated places. The data underlying it is more current than the other land cover variables.

Move a slider all the way to the left to remove an attribute from consideration. Slide it to the right to include it. Up to 10 variables may be evaluated at any one time. The check box at the top of the Analysis Settings shows only cores with flowing water in them.

Click a location to see how much each selected attribute contributed to its final score. It's important not to move the mouse at all while clicking, or it will pan the map instead. Close