Land Systems of the New Guinea Archipelago

The New Guinea Archipelago map consists of a west and east side. The west map represents the general land systems from the West Papua, Indonesia, region and the east map represents the Papua New Guinea region. Combined, these two maps cover the entire island of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago. The Land Systems map is a unification of the Regional Physical Planning Project for Transmigration (RePPProT) in western New Guinea, Indonesia, and the Papua New Guinea Resource Information System (PNGRIS). This unified classification was then improved where classes are split by slope using the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) elevation model. Few datasets exist that give a good representation of the biological surface cover across the entire island of New Guinea. This data will be valuable to conservation as an abiotic biodiversity surrogate used to measure the potential range of habitats in a given area and across the entire island.

Courtesy of Stuart Sheppard and Earl Saxon, The Nature Conservancy.