Invasive-species habitat-suitability surfaces. Canonical STAC: https://s3-west.nrp-nautilus.io/public-invasives/stac-collection.json
Currently one collection: inhabit-v4-2024 — USGS Invasive Species Habitat Tool (INHABIT)
v4.0, June 2024, for 12 fire-cycle-relevant invasive plants across the contiguous United States.
STAC: https://s3-west.nrp-nautilus.io/public-invasives/inhabit-v4-2024/stac-collection.json
These are modelled POTENTIAL habitat surfaces, not occurrence records. A high-suitability pixel says the environment could support the species, not that the species is there. Phrase every result as "suitable habitat for X" — never "X is present". What the data supports is an argument about invasion pressure and vulnerability.
Four more constraints that change answers, not just wording:
Nine products per species = 108 layers, each as a COG and an H3 res-10 hex:
mean for the continuous surfaces because relative suitability is a normalized index, not a
per-pixel amount — SUM is meaningless; aggregate with AVG or MAX. mode for the class
rasters, and nearest-neighbour on their warp: bilinear on class codes invents codes with no
upstream referent.
The -masked variants are the same three continuous ensembles restricted to the MESS training
envelope. Use them for roadless work; the retention table below is how much surface that removes.
integrated-binary-* class codesLabels are from the release's own documentation, not inferred: INHABIT_VersionHistory.txt
("categorical map combining unsuitable, occurrence suitable, abundance suitable, and high
abundance suitable") and Jarnevich et al. 2024 ("…while highlighting any areas of environmental
extrapolation"). The FGDC gives the domain -1 .. 3 but no labels.
Ranks are EXCLUSIVE in the raster but NESTED in the source's own tabulations: occurrence-suitable ground is suitability_class >= 1 (classes 1+2+3), abundance-suitable is >= 2, high-abundance-suitable is = 3. Counting class 1 alone undercounts occurrence-suitable ground by every cell that also clears a higher threshold.
mode keeps only each cell's dominant class and discards the mix, so this hex cannot answer
"how much area is high-abundance-suitable" without undercounting to plurality cells. At ~1.55
source pixels per res-10 cell the loss is small but one-directional. Per-class fractional
coverage is not produced by this pipeline.
-masked removesData pixels retained by the MESS-restricted variant, as a percent of the plain product (measured — exact full-raster bincount over all 108 source rasters):
Two things to carry from this table. For buffelgrass, -masked discards two thirds of CONUS —
a masked tabulation for that species is a statement about a third of the country, and the
masked-vs-plain choice moves the answer more than any threshold choice does. Red brome and
medusahead are next. Cheatgrass — the species most of the fire argument rests on — is barely
touched at 95%.
One anomaly, recorded rather than smoothed over: for Aegilops cylindrica abundance, the masked
file's value histogram is identical to the plain product (100.0% retained; the files differ by 476
bytes of TIFF metadata). Its high-abundance counterpart is genuinely masked. So for that one
species × product, -masked implies a safeguard that did nothing.
gHM (Global Human Modification — built substantially from roads, and already in this catalog as
global-human-modification) is a predictor in all 12 models. Restricted to the occurrence
models, which is what a distance-to-road gradient actually leans on:
Method: mean AUCdiff per predictor from each species' variableImportance.csv, pooled over the
five SAHM algorithms and data splits, negatives clipped to zero, expressed as a share of the
positive total. Full per-model-group breakdown in catalog/invasives/BUILD.md.
Consequence. Cheatgrass is the cleanest of the 12 and has no KDE-background occurrence model at all — its only occurrence model uses the bias-mitigated target-background design. Medusahead and red brome are also clean. Tamarisk is not: at 17.1% (rank 3/25) a tamarisk road-distance gradient is substantially the model reproducing its own predictor. Report tamarisk, Russian olive, jointed goatgrass, buffelgrass and Russian thistle as suitability-only.
This does not invalidate the suitability surfaces — human modification is a legitimate predictor of invasion. It invalidates only the inference "suitability rises near roads, therefore roads drive invasion" for the high-gHM species.
Raster layers have no PMTiles; render the COG through a titiler raster-tile endpoint. Use a
categorical colormap for integrated-binary-* — a continuous ramp misreads the -1
extrapolation flag as a suitability level.
USGS data release; FGDC useconst and accconst are both "None" → US federal work, public
domain.
Jarnevich, C.S., Engelstad, P., Williams, D.A., Shadwell, K.S., Reimer, C.J., Henderson, G.C., Prevey, J.S., and Pearse, I.S., 2024, INHABIT species potential distribution across the contiguous United States (ver. 4.0, June 2024): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P14HNEJF. Method: Jarnevich et al. 2024, NeoBiota 96:261-278, https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.96.134842.
66c3c389d34e03388287bba9 |
| Tamarix chinensis/ramosissima | tamarisk | 66bb7eccd34e033882814498 |
| Elaeagnus angustifolia | Russian olive | 66a68b88d34ea6469c870807 |
| Cenchrus ciliaris | buffelgrass | 66a29430d34ec831f2c2d2d7 |
integrated-binary-first | mode | nearest | class code (0.01 threshold, inclusive), see below |
integrated-binary-fifth | mode | nearest | class code (0.05 threshold, canonical), see below |
integrated-binary-tenth | mode | nearest | class code (0.10 threshold, targeted), see below |
| 93.9% |
| 93.9% |
| Bromus arvensis (field brome) | 94.3% | 97.3% | 97.3% |
| Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass) | 95.1% | 95.1% | 95.1% |
| Elaeagnus angustifolia (Russian olive) | 96.1% | 95.7% | 95.8% |
| Bromus japonicus (Japanese brome) | 97.2% | 98.2% | 98.2% |
| Tamarix chinensis/ramosissima (tamarisk) | 17.1% | 3/25 | circular — do not report |
| Elaeagnus angustifolia (Russian olive) | 17.6% | 3/27 | circular — do not report |
| Cenchrus ciliaris (buffelgrass) | 22.4% | 1/23 | circular — do not report |
| Aegilops cylindrica (jointed goatgrass) | 25.0% | 1/24 | circular — do not report |