Michigan DNR public forest inventory stand cover types, 2026 snapshot

Summary

This is a dated snapshot of Michigan DNR’s public Michigan Forest Inventory System stand-covertype layer, clipped to the project’s seven named island frames. The service describes a stand as a relatively homogeneous polygon whose attributes may include canopy composition, age, age structure, basal area, origin, and management information. The snapshot preserves the service attributes and the DNR’s free-text ecological comments, then joins each stand to held soil, wetland, and circa-1800 land-cover layers.

The result is asymmetric by design. The service returned 424 exact stand intersections on Beaver Island and none on Garden, High, Hog, Whiskey, North Fox, or South Fox. A zero result means that this DNR service returned no stand polygons in that island frame; it does not mean those islands lack forests or that another public or tribal inventory does not exist.

Island query results

The Beaver stand footprint is about 50.334 km² within the 151.076 km² held OSM island frame. That is inventory coverage, not a claim that the remaining area is unforested, unmanaged, or privately owned. The source ACRES values sum to 12,435.6 acres and are retained separately from the equal-area clipped geometry calculation.

Beaver Island cover-type structure

The largest current DNR cover-type groups by clipped area are:

One additional stand covers 0.613 km² but has no L4Covertype; the generated index keeps it in an explicit “Unclassified / no L4 cover code” bucket so the 424-stand total remains complete.

The cover groups are DNR inventory classifications, not direct translations of the MNFI natural-community classes. For example, a “Northern Hardwood” stand may be part of a larger mesic forest occurrence, while a lowland-conifer stand may include rich or poor conifer swamp, wet meadow, or other transitional conditions. The raw fields and comments are preserved for that finer reading.

DNR ecological comments and MNFI connectivity

The DNR comments contain direct ecological classifications or descriptions in 188 of the 424 Beaver stand records. After normalizing capitalization and trailing score text, the most common classifications are:

These classifications are valuable because they show DNR stand-level comments using the same broad ecological vocabulary as the MNFI report. They are not a geometry-based EO join: the DNR layer’s MNFICommunity field is generally not populated in this snapshot, and the text comments do not provide an MNFI EO boundary or ID for every stand.

The comments also contain direct wildlife and tree-management signals. Across the 424 stands, the normalized comment index finds deer in 219, swamp in 175, wet in 155, ash in 152, conifer in 143, hardwood in 138, cedar in 118, birch in 100, aspen in 96, beaver in 80, fir in 71, wildlife in 58, pine in 42, oak in 15, invasive-species language in 12, spruce in 11, and grouse in 10. These are substring counts over DNR comments and management notes, not abundance estimates or new species observations.

One representative comment describes a mesic northern forest as good wildlife habitat with flushed grouse, scattered aspen, red oak, ash, birch, and red maple, plus wet pockets. Other comments connect old beaver flooding to tree mortality and regeneration of lowland hardwood and swamp-conifer species, and describe dune-ridge mosaics of upland oak-pine and lowland cedar-fir. The raw GeoJSON preserves those source comments for review.

Stand-level physical context

Each clipped stand carries spatial context from the held layers. The summary below aggregates only the areas inside DNR stand polygons on Beaver Island; it does not describe the whole island.

Current SSURGO context

This makes the USDA survey’s soil vocabulary useful at stand scale, while keeping current map-unit boundaries distinct from the MNFI narrative’s site descriptions.

NWI wetland context

The largest NWI category inside DNR stand polygons is Freshwater Forested/Shrub Wetland at 23.279 km², followed by Lake (0.550), Freshwater Emergent Wetland (0.283), Freshwater Pond (0.062), and Riverine (0.021). A stand can contain a mapped wetland portion without being wholly a wetland, and NWI is not a legal wetland delineation.

Circa-1800 vegetation context

The historical land-cover categories intersecting the DNR stand footprint are:

This is a particularly useful historical-to-modern bridge: the same current public stand footprint can be read against DNR’s present cover type, SSURGO map-unit context, NWI wetland class, and the GLO-derived circa-1800 reconstruction. The comparison is spatial correspondence, not proof that a modern stand is continuous with a particular 1800 forest patch.

Evidence limits

The official service is a public forest inventory and its coverage is not the same thing as archipelago forest coverage. The query returned no stand polygons for six islands, so the archive must not interpret those zeros as ecological absence. The OSM boundaries used for clipping are research boundaries rather than cadastral or legal lines. Spatial intersections with SSURGO, NWI, and circa-1800 cover are calculated context, not causation, legal status, or an MNFI occurrence delineation. The snapshot is dated and should be refreshed if current stand conditions or DNR edits matter.

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes