Massachusetts Growing Degree Day and Precipitation Maps 2003

doi:10.6073/pasta/0d4bf41ee32cf5de5dac47193669374e Massachusetts Growing Degree Day and Precipitation Maps 2003 Brian Hall Glenn Motzkin Researcher Scott Ollinger https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6226-1431 Researcher 2023 English

A regression model that estimates monthly temperature and precipitation as a function of latitude, longitude, and elevation for the New England area was used to estimate annual growing degree days and precipitation for the state of Massachusetts. For details of the regression model please see the published paper (Ollinger, S.V., Aber, J.D., Federer, C.A., Lovett, G.M., Ellis, J.M., 1995. Modeling Physical and Chemical Climate of the Northeastern United States for a Geographic Information System. US Dept of Agriculture, Forest Service, Radnor, PA, USA).

air temperature climate geographic information systems precipitation region LTER controlled vocabulary disturbance LTER core area Harvard Forest HFR LTER USA HFR default

This dataset is released to the public under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 (No Rights Reserved). Please keep the dataset creators informed of any plans to use the dataset. Consultation with the original investigators is strongly encouraged. Publications and data products that make use of the dataset should include proper acknowledgement.

Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html CC0-1.0 https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/exist/apps/datasets/showData.html?id=hf088 Massachusetts. Coordinates based on WGS84 datum. -73.5 -69.9 +42.9 +41.3 2003 2003 complete Information Manager Harvard Forest

324 North Main Street Petersham MA 01366 USA

(978) 724-3302 hf-im@lists.fas.harvard.edu Harvard Forest

324 North Main Street Petersham MA 01366 USA

(978) 724-3302 (978) 724-3595 https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu

The following description of methods is quoted from the published paper (Hall, B., Motzkin, G., Foster, D.R., Syfert, M., Burk, J., 2002. Three hundred years of forest and land-use change in Massachusetts, USA. Journal of Biogeography 29, 1319-1335): "A one arc-degree (1:250,000 scale) digital elevation model (DEM) was created by joining existing Geographic Information System (GIS) datalayer grids (USGS, 1993) in ArcView GIS (ESRI, 1996). The DEM was then projected to the Massachusetts State Plane, North American Datum 1983 coordinate system and re-sampled to a grid size of 230 meters in ArcInfo (ESRI, 1999). All subsequent grids had the same projection and grid size. In order to evaluate relationships between vegetation and climate, regression equations from Ollinger et al. (1995) were used to calculate annual precipitation and monthly average temperature based on elevation, latitude, and longitude for each grid cell of the DEM. Monthly average temperatures less than 0 deg C were changed to 0 deg C, and the average monthly temperature grids were then multiplied by the number of days in the month to calculate the number of Growing Degree Days (GDD) for each month; all twelve months were then summed into a grid of annual GDD. Although climate may have changed in the 350 years since European settlement, we assume that climatic gradients across the study area are likely to have remained relatively consistent, and all analyses are conducted with modern climate data." The data file contains the following ArcView grids: (1) growdegree = modeled number of growing degree days per year. (2) precipitation = modeled annual precipitation in centimeters.

Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Harvard Forest

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(978) 724-3302 (978) 724-3595 https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu https://ror.org/059cpzx98 pointOfContact The Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program examines ecological dynamics in the New England region resulting from natural disturbances, environmental change, and human impacts. National Science Foundation LTER grants: DEB-8811764, DEB-9411975, DEB-0080592, DEB-0620443, DEB-1237491, DEB-1832210. hf088-01-gis.zip Massachusetts growing degree day and precipitation maps (GIS) hf088-01-gis.zip 543031 0b0df8eff90a8201d02975281f9c3075 zip Esri shapefile https://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/data/p08/hf088/hf088-01-gis.zip vector GIS