Description: Using digital soils data from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (downloaded from MassGIS), a series of selections and calculations were done to classify soil associations into 9 different categories of prime forest based ultimately on forest productivity in white pine and red oak. Other data sets were used to refine this classification, including aspect, 1999 land use - land cover, riparian, slope position, wetlands, hydrologic soil association and unique areas. The hydrologic soil associations were based on NRCS information that came as Access files with the soils data. All other data was available from MassGIS.
Copyright Text: This dataset was created by David Goodwin while he worked at two different organizations - the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Department of Natural Resources Conservation and at the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, Bureau of Forestry. He can be contacted at (413) 545-5748 or at david.goodwin@state.ma.us with any questions.