{"accessLevel": "public", "bureauCode": ["010:12"], "contactPoint": {"@type": "vcard:Contact", "fn": "Marc Pons", "hasEmail": "mailto:info@ceg.group"}, "description": "This single-band float32 GeoTIFF raster represents a spatially smoothed vulnerability\nindex for sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) ecosystems at the northern extent of the sagebrush\nbiome, spanning the US\u2013Canada border region from north-central Montana into\nsoutheastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan, with smaller portions of Wyoming,\nNorth Dakota, and South Dakota (approximately 46.0\u00b0N to 51.1\u00b0N latitude, 102.0\u00b0W to\n113.3\u00b0W longitude). The area falls primarily within the Northwestern Glaciated Plains\nand Northwestern Great Plains ecoregions (EPA Level III / CEC ecoregion classification),\nwith its western edge reaching the Rocky Mountain Front and Canadian Rockies foothills.\nThis region is the northernmost range of the Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus\nurophasianus), centered on the Milk River and Frenchman River basins, and is sometimes\nreferred to informally as the greater northern sagebrush biome. Vulnerability values\nare continuous and range from 1 (lowest vulnerability) to 8 (highest vulnerability),\nreflecting a composite assessment of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of\nsagebrush ecosystems to stressors including climate change, invasive species (e.g.,\ncheatgrass, Bromus tectorum), wildfire, and land conversion. A focal mean filter with\na window size of 10 pixels was applied to the source vulnerability raster. At the\nnative 100 m (nominal, projected-CRS) cell resolution, this window corresponds to a\nnominal 1,000 m ground footprint \u2014 see Positional Accuracy below for a caveat on true\nground distance under this projection. This smoothing reduces local pixel-level noise\nand emphasizes landscape-scale vulnerability patterns. The raster is projected in\nWGS 84 / Pseudo-Mercator (EPSG:3857) \u2014 selected for compatibility with ArcGIS Online\npublishing \u2014 with a datum of WGS84 (not NAD83). Cells with no data are assigned IEEE 754\nNaN (float32).", "distribution": [{"@type": "dcat:Distribution", "accessURL": "https://doi.org/10.5066/P14KPFAL", "description": "Landing page for access to the data", "format": "XML", "mediaType": "application/http", "title": "Digital Data"}, {"@type": "dcat:Distribution", "description": "The metadata original format", "downloadURL": "https://data.usgs.gov/datacatalog/metadata/USGS.6a3ece3e1ba49b7c2e2634db.xml", "format": "XML", "mediaType": "text/xml", "title": "Original Metadata"}], "identifier": "http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/USGS_6a3ece3e1ba49b7c2e2634db", "keyword": ["Alberta", "Artemisia", "EPSG:3857", "GeoTIFF", "Greater Sage-Grouse", "Montana", "North Dakota", "Northern Great Plains", "Northern Rocky Mountains", "Northwestern Glaciated Plains", "Northwestern Great Plains", "Saskatchewan", "South Dakota", "USGS:6a3ece3e1ba49b7c2e2634db", "WGS84", "Wyoming", "biota", "cheatgrass", "climate change", "conservation planning", "environment", "focal mean smoothing", "geoscientificInformation", "invasive species", "raster", "sagebrush", "sagebrush steppe", "shrubland", "vulnerability index", "wildfire"], "modified": "2026-08-17T00:00:00Z", "publisher": {"@type": "org:Organization", "name": "U.S. Geological Survey"}, "spatial": "-113.3097, 45.9977, -101.9756, 51.1180", "theme": ["geospatial"], "title": "Greater Northern Sagebrush Vulnerability Map"}