Potential alpine habitat in the western USA based on treeline elevation

<p><strong>Purpose</strong>: create a map of potential alpine habitat in the western USA as a basis for future studies in ecology and biogeography.</p> <p><strong>Location</strong>: all mountains in the continental USA west of 104° longitude.</p> <p><strong>Procedure</strong>: manually identify treeline elevations; interpolate a surface of these elevations; intersect the surface with a 90-m resolution DEM; record all areas above these elevations as projected alpine habitat; for display, map the area recorded as alpine at 90-m resolution.</p> <p><strong>Products</strong>: a map for display; a dataset of elevations of treeline at 268 points on 66 mountain ranges in the western USA (61) and Canada (5); a dataset of points recorded as above treeline at 90-m resolution.</p>