Index of Ecological Integrity (IEI)

Index of Ecological Integrity for 13 states in the Northeast

The Index of Ecological Integrity (IEI), is a product of the Conservation Assessment and Prioritization System (CAPS), an ecosystem-based approach for assessing the ecological integrity of land and water and subsequently identifying and prioritizing areas for habitat and biodiversity conservation. It has been used by conservation practitioners for over 15 years to target areas for protection as a component of strategic land conservation.

The CAPS analysis was applied to 13 states in the northeastern United States using The Nature Conservancy’s Ecological Systems Map, which delineates ecological systems such as various types of forests or wetlands. We added streams and various classes of developed land and roads. The model evaluates two dozen landscape metrics for every point in the landscape, assessing effects such as microclimatic alterations associated with “edge effects,” intensity of road traffic in the vicinity, the inflow of road salt to aquatic ecosystems, or the effects of human development on landscape connectivity. These metrics are combined separately for each ecological system into an Index of Ecological Integrity, which scores each point in the landscape relative to all other points in the same system.

Regional IEI for the Montpelier Vermont area

IEI is scaled four ways: regionally, such that each point is compared with others in the same ecolocical system across the entire northeast, as well as by state, ecoregion, and watershed. These latter scalings can be useful when working in relatively developed areas where regional IEI is low.

Funding for development and application of CAPS has been provided by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the USGS Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game, The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under section 104 (b)(3) of the U.S. Clean Water Act, the Federal Highway Administration via a grant administered by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, Massachusetts Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, Massachusetts Audubon Society, and The Trustees of Reservations. Coastal metrics were developed in collaboration with the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management.

Documentation

How IEI works: DSL_documentation_iei.pdf

Description of the closely-related Massachusetts version: https://umasscaps.org/about/index.html

Technical report: https://umassdsl.org/DSLdocs/DSL_documentation_integrity.pdf

Published manuscript: DOI | PDF (submitted version) | request PDF of published paper

EcoAssess web app

We have created a web app that allows you to easily view IEI and ecoConnect across the Northeast. The app includes a site scoring tool that produces a report with IEI and ecoConnect scores for a project area, either drawn on the map or uploaded as a shapefile.

EcoAssess is available at umassdsl.shinyapps.io/ecoassess

Download GIS data

GeoTIFFs of IEI for the northeastern United States are available for each of the four scales (regional, state, ecoregion, and HUC 6 watershed):

Served GIS data

Results are also available as a Web Map Service (WMS) on our GeoServer:
https://umassdsl.webgis1.com/geoserver/wms

  1. Entire Northeast: IEI:iei_regional
  2. State: IEI:iei_state
  3. Ecoregion: IEI:iei_ecoregion
  4. HUC 6 watershed: IEI:iei_huc6

Note that the values of the served data are IEI x 100.