The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) partnered on a project to map the current vegetation, water, and urban patterns (“land cover”) of Wisconsin.
A grant from the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program has facilitated access to a GIS database of 1930s-era economic inventory maps for coastal areas of Wisconsin.
Report on a series of public forums held in 2015 to gather information on user needs for the Wisconsin Historic Landscape Database. This database was derived from the 1832-1866 General Land Office survey of Wisconsin documenting information about soils, vegetation, cultural features, and wetlands.
Land cover and land use are often used as interchangeable terms, but each designates a specific type of information. Land cover designates the vegetation or other type of cover that is on the land (grass, red oak, concrete). Land use designates the human-derived applications and activities that take place on the land (agriculture, commercial, residential). There are a variety of state and national products available that map the past and present land cover and/or land use of an area.
After more than two years of work, new statewide land cover products are now available for download from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
The final report of the Wisconsin Historic Landscape 2015 Community Forum Project is now available for viewing and download.
The Wiscland 2 project is moving forward with more detailed maps after receiving positive feedback on the initial Level 1 product delivery in January. As the maps get more complex there are new challenges, but the initial results are very promising.
There is still a lot of work to be done before the final product is finished in the summer of 2016, but initial accuracy results show overall accuracy exceeds 90 percent for this draft product.
The fieldwork season has wrapped up and the Wiscland 2 team is now making maps! Between the beginning of June and end of August, DNR field crews gathered over 16,000 additional sample points representing the current land cover of our state.
The fieldwork season has begun to complete the samples database for the Wiscland-2 land cover mapping project! To round out the training/validation dataset of over 500,000 samples, ten Field Technicians have been brought on for the summer and are traveling the state to identify and collect GPS locations and ecological information with the aid of a DNR field mentor stationed in their collection region.
