GAP ANALYSIS

GAP data was obtained from the UCSB Gap Analysis web site at :

http://www.biogeog.ucsb.edu/projects/gap/gap_home.html

The data itself can be found at:

http://www.biogeog.ucsb.edu/projects/gap/gap_data_reg.html


The data files were downloaded for the Central Western Ecoregion on 2/3/99.  The ARC/INFO Export files were imported into MIPS, coverted from Albers to UTM projection and exported as Arc shapefiles.  Accessory tables were transformed directly from ARC/INFO to .dbf format using ArcView's Export71 program.  Key fields from these "lookup" tables (primary and secondary species, Holland communities, and Wildlife-Habitat Relationships (WHR) habitat types) were incorporated into the shapefile attribute table by importing the shapefile's .dbf file into Microsoft Access, adding and updating the fields, and then exporting back to .dbf format.  This was done to avoid having to link to multiple tables before being able to interpret the habitat and species codes used in the original data.  This way, all the information is in one table and can be queried and displayed more easily in ArcView or ArcExplorer. 

The GAP data shows vegetation as interpreted and classified from a 1990 Landsat satellite image.  The best fields to use for viewing the polygons are habitats based on "WHR1Name" (primary Wildlife Habitat Relationship habitat type) or "CNDDB1_NAM" (primary California Natural Diversity Data
Base or "Holland" system habitat type).

Full documentation is available in the file vegdd.ps (located in the same directory as this file) but requires a PostScript viewer to read.  

A PostScript viewer for Windows is provided on WATER Disk #1 in the Helpers\PSViewer subdirectory.  Install the viewer to your hard drive by double-clicking on the setup.exe file in the PSViewer subdirectory.  Before running RoPS (the name of the viewer program), be sure to run the program called Fontscan.exe to load your font list into the program.

As an alternative, a makeshift copy of the documentation (without the formatting provided in the PostScript version) is provided as vegdoc.txt.

Additional materials related to the GAP project can be found at the web site listed above.