Biophysical Settings

LANDFIRE's (LF) Biophysical Settings (BPS) represent the vegetation that may have been dominant on the landscape prior to Euro-American settlement and is based on both the current biophysical environment and an approximation of the historical disturbance regime.

Map units are based on NatureServe's Ecological Systems classification and represent the natural plant communities that may have been present during the reference period. Each BPS map unit is matched with a model of vegetation succession, and both serve as key inputs to the LANDSUM landscape succession model.

• The actual time period for this data set is a composite of both the historical context provided by the fire regime and vegetation dynamics models and the more recent field and geospatial inputs used to create it.
• BPS is unchanged from LF National's BPS except for updates made to water, barren, and snow classes (additions or removal), so that not-vegetated cover types within the BPS product matches LF existing vegetation and fuel products.

For LF Remap, Mean Fire Return Interval (MFRI), Percent of Low-severity Fire (PLS), Percent of Mixed-severity Fire (PMS), Percent of Replacement-severity Fire (PRS), and Fire Regime Groups (FRG) are attributes of BPS.

LF uses BPS to depict reference conditions of vegetation across landscapes.

Product availability

Attribute Data Dictionary

CSV for Attribute Tables (LF 2.0.0)
CSV for Attribute Tables (LF 1.4.0)
(Why is the CSV important?)

Download Data

Metadata:

• CONUS (LF 2.0.0) [HTML] [XML]
• AK (LF 1.4.0) [HTML] [XML]
• HI (LF 1.4.0) [HTML] [XML]