Description: The Landscape Project combines documented wildlife locations with NJDEP aerial photo-based Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) to delineate imperiled and special concern species habitat within New Jersey. Many species occurrence locations cannot be published because they may represent nest sites, roost sites, dens and other sites used by species that are vulnerable to human disturbance and, in some cases, susceptible to illegal collection. At the same time, wildlife moves, as individual animals use various habitat features within the landscape to fulfill their foraging, sheltering and breeding needs. Therefore, protecting individual occurrences or the area used by one individual is generally not sufficient to protect the local population. Landscape Project maps address these issues by displaying habitat patches that animals use and that are required to support local populations, rather than pinpointing exact locations of the most sensitive wildlife sites or simply protecting points where species happened to be observed at one point in time. Prior to combining species occurrence data with LULC data to form the habitat patches that make up the Species-Based Habitat layer, each dataset was generated according to a specific data development process.
Service Item Id: 047223c2d68a4ac59ef95093a2982891
Copyright Text: New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), Fish and Wildlife (FW), Office of Fish and Wildlife Information Systems