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Habitat blocks are areas of contiguous forest and other natural habitats that are unfragmented by roads, development, or agriculture. Vermonts habitat blocks are primarily forests, but also include wetlands, rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, cliffs, and rock outcrops. Forests included in habitat blocks may be young, early-successional stands, actively managed forests, or mature forests with little or no recent logging activity. The defining factor is that there is little or no permanent habitat fragmentation from roads and other forms of development within a habitat block. This layer is a statewide representation of all habitat blocks larger than 20 acres, as derived from NOAA Coastal Change Analysis Program (CCAP) 2006 Era Land Cover Data and ancillary data (Vermont roads and E911, etc.). Each block has been ranked for its biological and conservation values and for the potential threat from fragmentation. Purpose: 1) Identify habitat blocks using best-available GIS data. 2) Rank the habitat blocks for their biological and conservation value and for the potential threat to them from fragmentation. The habitat block attribute table includes information on the 11 biological and physical diversity factors used to rank the 4,055 blocks. A brief description of these 11 factors is provided in the polygon attributes metadata under F1raw-F11raw. The F1raw-F11raw fields provide the raw ranking scores for the habitat blocks; the F1rcl-F11rcl fields provide the ranking scores for the blocks separated into 10 classes, using the classification method specified for each factor. Similarly, the Fwght field provides the final weighted score for each habitat block, incorporating the ranks from each of the 11 biological and physical diversity factors and the weighting assigned to each; the Fwghtrcl field provides the final weighted score for each habitat block separated into 10 equal interval classes. |