Ecological Land Units, Northern Appalachian

Developed by The Nature Conservancy Eastern Division. The Ecological Land Units (ELU) is a composite of several layers of abiotic information: elevation, bedrock geology, distribution of deep glacial sediments that mask bedrock’s geochemical effects, moisture availability, and landform. An ELU grid of 30 meter cells was developed for the Lower New England-Northern Piedmont (LNE) and North Atlantic Coast (NAC) ecoregions. The ELU dataset describes the “ecological potential” of the landscape, but carries no information about actual landuse or landcover in a region where human alterations to the landscape have everywhere affected the natural vegetation. The current dataset informs ELUs with landcover data, bringing them to earth by telling us what is actually on the ground. We may use this dataset to map ecological systems, which are dynamic assemblages of communities that occur in a mosaic on the landscape, and that are linked by shared ecological processes and environmental gradients.