Landscape patterns: Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) landcover maps—The MRLC consortium (Loveland and Shaw 1996) has developed landcover maps with a consistent interpretation protocol for the entire South. The MRLC protocol (Vogelmann and others 1998) combines Thematic Mapper (satellite) imagery from the early 1990s with other spatial databases to map landcover at a spatial resolution of 0.09 hectares per pixel. Thirteen State maps were obtained from the MRLC database and combined for this analysis. The maps for three of the States (Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas) were in draft form at the time of this analysis (December 2000). The parts of Oklahoma and Texas outside the Assessment area were excluded from the analysis. The landcover maps were summarized for the original 21 landcover types and also for a lumped 8-class version of the map. Lumped categories are: (1) water, (2) developed/urban, (3) barren/disturbed, (4) forest, (5) shrubland, (6) agriculture, and (7) grassland.
