Cores, also referred to as “intact habitat areas,” are undisturbed land areas at least 100 acres in size and at least 200 meters wide. They were derived using a combination of the National Land Cover Database (2011) and the US Census Bureau’s TIGER files roads and railroads. Paved roads and railways are considered to be fragmenting features, as are developed and agricultural areas. We followed a methodology published by the Green Infrastructure Center, Inc., which can be found here. The tools and data we used to create cores can be found here. Our hope is that you have great local data to use in place of the national datasets to recreate intact habitat cores in a local region.