Classification Distribution Accuracy

Bare ground represents areas with less than 15% vegetation cover.

The bare ground class primarily occurs on steep upslope bedrock, unconsolidated rock, mountain peaks, jutting rock outcrops, and talus slopes. It also represents exposed alluvial deposits along rivers, especially those with wide outwash plains. In addition, it represents the debris-covered surfaces of glaciers, typically increasing in cover toward a glacier’s terminus. Bare ground is often found adjacent to the sparse vegetation, dwarf shrub-rock and dwarf shrub landcover classes. Elevation for the class ranges up to 5,536 meters based on the spectral map (Table 3). It dominates the Alaska Range-high mountains ecoregion (Tables 4a and 4b; Clark 1998) and covers 9.8% (592,298 acres) of Denali National Park and Preserve (Table 5).

The producer’s accuracy for the bare ground class is 70.7%, with a user’s accuracy of 86.5%. Most of the errors of omission and commission are with the sparse vegetation class.