Michigan DNR public forest inventory stand covertype crosswalk, 2026

What this adds

This crosswalk connects a current Michigan DNR forest-inventory layer to the archipelago’s existing forest, wetland, soil, geology, and natural-community evidence. The source layer is unusually useful because its stand unit carries more ecological structure than a broad land-cover raster: covertype, canopy composition, age class, basal area, age structure, and upland/lowland status are part of the MiFI data model. The project output preserves the source polygons, the clipping method, and the island-by-island query results.

It is also a coverage audit. The service returned 424 stands intersecting the held Beaver Island geometry, totaling 50.334035 km² after clipping and 12,435.6063 source acres. It returned no stands for Garden, High, Hog, Whiskey, North Fox, or South Fox islands. Those zeroes indicate that this public forest inventory query has no returned polygons in those island frames; they do not mean those islands lack forests, wetlands, trees, or natural communities.

Beaver Island stand baseline

The largest returned cover groups are:

The remaining returned groups include mixed non-forested wetland, natural pines, mixed upland conifers, sand/soil, water, herbaceous openland, low-density trees, exposed rock, upland shrub, oak types, and road/parking lot. Exact code-level counts and all 424 clipped stand features remain in the JSON and GeoJSON outputs; the article reports the largest groups for readability.

The 424-stand frame is not directly comparable to the 17 numbered MNFI 2017 occurrence records. MiFI stands are inventory/management polygons, while MNFI records are natural-community element occurrences with their own survey boundaries and ranks. A MiFI cover group is therefore not a replacement for an MNFI natural-community classification, and the crosswalk does not assign an MNFI EO to a particular stand.

Forest, wetland, and soil connectivity

The island-level joins provide a reproducible comparison frame for future analysis:

• the clipped MiFI stands total 50.334035 km²;
• the held NWI context is dominated by freshwater forested/shrub wetland at 23.278528 km², followed by lake, freshwater emergent wetland, freshwater pond, and riverine classes;
• the circa-1800 reconstruction is dominated by beech–sugar maple–hemlock forest at 33.899790 km², with mixed conifer swamp at 11.686273 km² and smaller mixed hardwood, cedar, black-ash, shrub-swamp/emergent-marsh, lake/river, and sand-dune classes; and
• the largest intersected SSURGO symbols are Rc (14.659284 km²), KLB (7.994770 km²), BdA (6.044919 km²), Ak (4.209764 km²), LU (3.437586 km²), TC (2.317592 km²), and An (2.132794 km²).

These figures are island-level context, not stand-specific soil or wetland assignments. They make it possible to ask which current inventory categories occur within the broader historical and physical setting, while retaining the scale mismatch instead of implying ecological continuity.

The DNR stand comments also preserve source-bounded ecological vocabulary. Normalized comment signals include mesic northern forest, dry-mesic northern forest, northern hardwood swamp, northern wet meadow, boreal forest, and rich conifer swamp. These are searchable management or field-note signals, not new MNFI occurrence records or independent species observations.

Island connectivity and coverage limits

The seven-island query deliberately keeps all results, including zero-result queries. This is valuable for deciding where the next retrieval should go: public-land ownership or an agency-specific inventory may explain why Beaver has returned stands while the other islands do not. The zero-result islands should be connected to MNFI, GLO, mapped-dune, NWI, NLCD, and biodiversity records rather than treated as ecological blanks.

The service describes data collected primarily through field inventory and updated on a roughly ten-year compartment cycle. It is therefore a current inventory snapshot, not a complete 2026 forest map, a parcel-owner register, or a time series. Stand polygons may represent public inventory holdings and do not establish ownership by themselves. Private-land stands, unsurveyed land, other agency inventories, and gaps in the service must be investigated separately.

Evidence limits

The analysis uses the held OSM named-island geometries for exact clipping. OSM boundaries are a working research frame, not cadastral or legal boundaries. Intersected areas are calculated in equal-area EPSG:6933 and should not be read as the source agency’s official acreage. SSURGO, NWI, and circa-1800 values are joined at island context scale. The output does not establish historical continuity, ecological causation, habitat suitability, or overlap between any MiFI polygon and an MNFI element occurrence.

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes