NPS Photo
Overview
The forest community structure of Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park lands responds to two major factors: Past land use and soil conditions. The forest patterns reflect past land use in successional stages from pioneer community types (pine) to disturbance climax communities (oak-hickory). The vegetation of the battlefields is classified as oak-hickory forest in the temperate deciduous biome. The vegetation of Chatham ranged from mixed hardwood forests to landscaped formal gardens to farm fields. Above Chatham Lane, there are predominantly grassy meadows with a cedar hedgerow. The steeply sloping portion of the site contains primarily deciduous hardwoods, including yellow poplar, hickory elm, and dogwood. A dense ground cover consists mainly of honeysuckle, greenbrier, arrowwoods, and blueberries. Since woodlands have been repeatedly disturbed, opportunistic exotic plants have invaded the native woodlands, and in some cases, reached possible problem stages.The Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park Vegetation Inventory Project delivers many geospatial and vegetation data products, including an in-depth project report discussing methods and results, which include descriptions to vegetation associations, field keys to vegetation associations, map classification, and map-class descriptions. The suite of products also includes a database of vegetation plots, and accuracy assessment (AA) sites; digital images of field sites; digital aerial imagery; digital maps; a contingency table listing AA results; and a geodatabase of vegetation, field sites (vegetation plots, and AA sites), aerial imagery, project boundary, and metadata.
Products
The products of vegetation mapping projects are stored and managed in the National Park Service's Data Store, a repository for documents and publications relating to park resources. From the highlighted items below, click on the type of information you are looking for.
Last updated: October 9, 2018