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Global Ecological Land Units (ELUs)

Summary

Type of release
ongoing release of a series of related datasets

Data Licence
Not Applicable

Content Licence
Creative Commons CCZero

Verification
automatically awarded

Release Date
9 December 2014
Modified Date
31 August 2015
Update Frequency
asNeeded
Publishers
U.S. Geological Survey, Department of the Interior
Identifier
global-ecological-land-units-elus
Landing Page
http://catalog.data.gov/dataset/global-ecological-land-units-elus
Theme
ecosystems0617

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Description

In response to the need and an intergovernmental commission for a high resolution and data-derived global ecosystem map, land surface elements of global ecological pattern were characterized in an ecophysiographic stratification of the planet. The stratification produced 3,923 terrestrial ecological land units (ELUs) at a base resolution of 250 meters. The ELUs were derived from data on land surface features in a three step approach. The first step involved acquiring or developing four global raster datalayers representing the primary components of ecosystem structure: bioclimate, landform, lithology, and land cover. These datasets generally represent the most accurate, current, globally comprehensive, and finest spatial and thematic resolution data available for each of the four inputs. The second step involved a spatial combination of the four inputs into a single, new integrated raster dataset where every cell represents a combination of values from the bioclimate, landforms, lithology, and land cover datalayers. This foundational global raster datalayer, called ecological facets (EFs), contains 47,650 unique combinations of the four inputs. The third step involved an aggregation of the EFs into the 3,923 ELUs.


General Information


Legal Information

This dataset has been created by US Government which means it is required to be in the public domain. However US copyright law only allows open access by US citizens, we have assumed the data is equivalently licensed as CC0 for the rest of the world as this is in the spirit of the US Government’s Open Data policy.
  • The rights statement is at

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  • Outside the US, this data is available under

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  • There are

    yes, and the rights are all held by the same person or organisation Do you think this data is incorrect? Let us know

  • The content is available under

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  • This data contains

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  • This data changes

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  • Find out how to contact someone about this data at

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