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MNFI natural-community ecological connectivity matrix, 2017

Also MNFI occurrence connectivity matrix · natural-community ecology matrix

Draft — sources verified, prose evolving

TypeDataset
Dates2017 – 2026
WithinBeaver Island archipelago
ErasModern era
On this page
Dataset
Dates
2017 – 2026
Eras
Modern era
Concepts
environmentgeologysoilsvegetationforeststreeswildlifebirdswetlandsconservation
Within
Beaver Island archipelago

What this adds

The project now has separate, source-specific indexes for plants, trees, and wildlife. This matrix joins those layers at the shared MNFI occurrence ID and keeps the original occurrence description beside the joined evidence. It is a way to ask “what plants, trees, animals, birds, soils, and disturbances are described together at this named community occurrence?” without converting those descriptions into a generalized habitat model.

The matrix contains all 43 MNFI 2017 occurrence records, covering 16 natural community types on Beaver, Garden, High, and Hog islands:

Joined layer Retained rows Distinct occurrence records
MNFI occurrence records 43 43
Plant-name evidence 1,145 43
Tree/woody-vegetation evidence 196 41
Wildlife/habitat-signal evidence 78 28

The matrix also groups the records by community type and retains the exact element-occurrence ID, site name, report pages, source lines, visual-evidence manifest, and all source-preserved ecological facets.

Cross-layer patterns

The grouped summaries make several relationships easy to inspect:

  • Boreal forest: four occurrences connect cedar, fir, pine, spruce, birch, oak, maple, and other plants with acidic-to-alkaline sand, cobble, shoreline, swale, and till vocabulary. All four have retained deer or beaver signals, including browse, herbivory, deer yards, flooding, and beaver sign.
  • Coastal fen: five occurrences on Garden and Hog connect 28 plant taxa and cedar/tamarack structure with marl, peat, groundwater, seepage, alkaline conditions, crayfish burrows, and Hine’s emerald dragonfly habitat.
  • Great Lakes marsh: three occurrences connect marsh vegetation and woody margins with fish spawning, shorebirds, secretive marsh birds, American bittern, Virginia rail, and sora. The direct bird observations remain tied to the named Indian Harbor occurrence rather than generalized across all marsh.
  • Mesic northern forest: five occurrences connect 34 plant taxa and ten tree taxa with deer browse, beaver-influenced wetlands, ground-moraine or dune/cobble context, and regeneration concerns.
  • Open dunes: five occurrences connect dune plants and scattered pine, cedar, fir, birch, and spruce with beach, cobble, sand, shoreline, deer, and Lake Huron locust signals.
  • Rich conifer swamp: four occurrences connect 30 plant taxa and 11 tree taxa with peat, sphagnum, swales, shoreline or wet-sand context, deer yards, deer browse, beaver flooding, and animal trails.

These are summaries of source-preserved occurrence descriptions. They are not abundance rankings, community-wide species lists, or proof that every member of a community type has the same composition.

Complete community-type profile

The full 16-type summary is retained in the generated matrix. This compact table makes the coverage and joined evidence visible without turning the profiles into habitat prescriptions. Taxon numbers count normalized evidence labels; the parenthetical names are representative source-preserved labels, not ranked abundance.

Community type Occurrences Islands Plant taxa Tree taxa and representative names Wildlife signals and representative names Soil/hydrology vocabulary
Bog 2 Beaver 18 4: black spruce, red pine, tamarack, white pine 0 acidic, dune, groundwater, inundated, lakeplain, peat
Boreal Forest 4 Beaver, Garden, High 24 11: balsam fir, hemlock, northern white-cedar, paper birch, red maple 7: beaver, flooding, sign, deer acidic, alkaline, beach, circumneutral, cobble, dune
Coastal Fen 5 Garden, Hog 28 2: northern white-cedar, tamarack 2: crayfish, Hine’s emerald dragonfly acidic, alkaline, cobble, gravel, groundwater, inundated
Dry-mesic Northern Forest 2 Beaver, High 19 10: balsam fir, hemlock, northern white-cedar, paper birch, red maple 3: deer, browse, herbivory acidic, alkaline, dune, sand, shoreline, swale
Great Lakes Barrens 1 High 19 7: balsam fir, northern white-cedar, paper birch, red oak, red pine 0 acidic, alkaline, beach, cobble, dune, gravel
Great Lakes Marsh 3 Garden, Hog 21 4: northern white-cedar, paper birch, tamarack, white spruce 6: American bittern, fish spawning, marsh birds, shorebirds alkaline, cobble, gravel, inundated, organics, sand
Interdunal Wetland 1 Beaver 21 5: northern white-cedar, paper birch, tamarack, white pine, white spruce 1: beaver alkaline, beach, dune, gravel, sand, shoreline
Limestone Cobble Shore 4 Garden, High, Hog 28 5: balsam fir, northern white-cedar, paper birch, tamarack, white spruce 3: driftwood habitat, herptiles, insects alkaline, beach, cobble, dune, gravel, organics
Mesic Northern Forest 5 Beaver, Garden, High, Hog 33 10: balsam fir, hemlock, northern white-cedar, paper birch, red maple 4: beaver, deer, browse, herbivory acidic, alkaline, cobble, dune, groundwater, humus
Northern Fen 2 Garden, Hog 13 2: northern white-cedar, tamarack 4: beaver, dam, crayfish, Hine’s emerald dragonfly alkaline, circumneutral, groundwater, inundated, marl, peat
Open Dunes 5 Beaver, High 27 6: balsam fir, northern white-cedar, paper birch, red pine, white pine 3: beaver, deer, Lake Huron locust alkaline, beach, cobble, dune, gravel, sand
Poor Conifer Swamp 1 Beaver 17 5: black spruce, red maple, tamarack, white pine, yellow birch 1: animal trails acidic, groundwater, peat, seepage, sphagnum, till
Poor Fen 1 Beaver 24 4: black spruce, northern white-cedar, red maple, tamarack 0 acidic, groundwater, inundated, lakeplain, peat, saturated
Rich Conifer Swamp 4 Beaver, Hog 30 11: balsam fir, black ash, black spruce, hemlock, northern white-cedar 8: animal trails, beaver, flooding, sign acidic, alkaline, circumneutral, cobble, dune, organics
Sand and Gravel Beach 2 High 8 0 0 alkaline, beach, cobble, dune, gravel, sand
Wooded Dune and Swale Complex 1 Garden 26 6: balsam fir, black ash, northern white-cedar, paper birch, red pine 0 acidic, alkaline, dune, organics, peat, sand

The occurrence pages and element-occurrence IDs remain the authority behind each row. For example, “fish spawning” appears in the retained Great Lakes Marsh evidence, while “Hine’s emerald dragonfly” appears in selected fen records; neither signal should be generalized to every marsh or fen on the islands. Likewise, the repeated presence of cedar or tamarack in fen and swamp rows is source description, not a complete stand-composition model.

Island context and scale

Each occurrence record carries a compact island-context reference with 2025 NLCD forest/wetland/barren area, leading SSURGO map-unit labels, and regional geology categories. These fields allow comparison with the physical and remote-sensing layers, but the join is by island name. The matrix does not assert that a soil polygon, geology unit, NLCD class, or public forest stand overlaps a particular MNFI occurrence.

The MNFI occurrence layer covers four islands only. North Fox, South Fox, and Whiskey remain outside this 2017 occurrence matrix, even though they are part of the broader archipelago soil, geology, land-cover, and wildlife frame. That is a source-coverage boundary, not evidence that those islands lack analogous communities or species.

Evidence limits

  • Exact plant and tree matches are retrieval aids based on source-preserved names; repeated rows are not counts of individuals, stems, or abundance.
  • Wildlife rows retain selected source-wording signals. A missing row means no retained match under the current extraction rules, not biological absence.
  • The 43 MNFI records are occurrence-level descriptions, not a complete flora, fauna, or polygon inventory for any island.
  • Island-level NLCD, SSURGO, geology, and related context is comparative only; no EO-, parcel-, or observation-level overlap is inferred.
  • Current and historical layers have different dates and purposes. The matrix preserves those dates instead of treating all evidence as contemporaneous.

See also

Sources

  1. Project-generated MNFI natural-community ecological connectivity matrix (2026).
    Contains all 43 MNFI occurrence records, grouped into 16 community types, with occurrence-ID joins to plant, tree, wildlife, soil/hydrology, and island-context evidence. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
    research · island_farming · crosswalks · mnfi_natural_community_connectivity_matrix
  2. Project build script for the MNFI natural-community connectivity matrix.
    Reproduces the EO-ID join and community aggregation without inferring occurrence geometry or environmental-polygon overlap. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
    scripts · build_mnfi_natural_community_connectivity_matrix
  3. Project-generated MNFI soil, vegetation, tree, and wildlife crosswalk (2017).
    Provides the 43 occurrence records and source-preserved soil/hydrology, vegetation/tree, animal/bird, disturbance, and stewardship facets. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
    research · island_farming · crosswalks · mnfi_soil_vegetation_wildlife_crosswalk
  4. Project-generated plant and vegetation evidence index.
    Provides 1,145 exact plant-name evidence rows from the 2017 occurrence descriptions. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
    research · island_farming · indices · plant_vegetation_evidence_index
  5. Project-generated tree and woody vegetation evidence index.
    Provides 196 MNFI tree evidence rows from 41 occurrence records. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
    research · island_farming · indices · tree_woody_vegetation_evidence_index
  6. Project-generated wildlife and habitat evidence index.
    Provides 78 source-wording animal/bird and habitat-signal rows from 28 occurrence records. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
    research · wildlife · indices · wildlife_habitat_evidence_index
  7. Project-generated island-scale environmental context carried by the wildlife/habitat index.
    Provides selected island-level NLCD, SSURGO, regional geology, and public-observation context for comparison; it does not claim EO-specific overlap. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
    research · wildlife · indices · wildlife_habitat_evidence_index
  8. Project-generated seven-island ecology connectivity matrix (2026).
    Described in this archive: Seven-island ecology connectivity matrix, 2026.
    Extends the four-island MNFI occurrence matrix into a seven-island comparison frame while retaining the occurrence-level and island-level scale distinction. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
    research · island_farming · crosswalks · archipelago_ecology_connectivity_matrix_2026

Added 3 August 2026. Recent changes

Cite this article

Beaver Island Archive, “MNFI natural-community ecological connectivity matrix, 2017”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/mnfi-natural-community-connectivity-matrix-2017/, accessed [date], citing Project-generated MNFI natural-community ecological connectivity matrix (2026). (and 7 further sources listed on the page).

Last revised 2026-08-03. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.

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