Major Vegetation Types Found at Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah

National Park Service, Intermountain GIS Program Office

This GIS theme is a representation of the major vegetation types found within and adjacent to Bryce Canyon National Park. In the summer of 1994 field mapping was conducted with the use of air photos, Orthophoto quads, digital line graphs for hypsography and other ancillary data to aid in the delineation of vegetation polygons. The 1994 season yielded the polygon representations and major vegetation components. Field work conducted in the summer of 1995 acquired land cover components such as % canopy, shrub, grass, and forb covers, % litter, % bare ground, and prominence and dispersion estimates for each species noted. The attribute information from field surveys was developed into a series of relational lookup tables and contains more information as to the vegetative structure of each polygon. Brca_veg95.can contains % canopy, Brca_veg95.for contains forb covers, Brca_veg95.gra contains grass, brca_veg95.lit contains % of litter and brca_veg95.shr contains shrub data. Transects were conducted in each of the polygon types to obtain the above information and a GIS cover created for further use (veg95trans). Like areas had the transect information transcribed into them to reduce redundancy. Information on 118 types was collected on the 72,000+ acres mapped.