1. The biogeoclimatic zones data came from the BC government site BEC Mapping at http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hre/becweb/subsite-map/provdigital-01.htm . The map uses the North American 1983 Datum (NAD83) and an Albers Equal Area Conic projection. It was last updated in April of 2003. The metadata can be found here. The map was available in ARC export format as a pkzipped archive. The scales of the sources for this map were from 1:100,000 to 1:500,000.
2. The land use and transportation data is from the BC government's Baseline Thematic Mapping (BTM) map sheets 92 G, 92 H, 92 I, and 92 J, which are at a scale of 1:250,000. These map sheets were chosen based on the general habitat range shown in the Rare Birds of British Columbia species summary (2). I would like to thank Dave Minty, the Discipline Authority and Data Format Contact, who gave me access to this data. The data uses North American 1983 Datum (NAD83) and the Universal Transverse Mercator projection for zone 10. The metadata are available here. The data came as ESRI shapefiles and were last updated in April of 2003.
3. The park boundary data is also from the BC government and was downloaded from http://srmwww.gov.bc.ca/gis/arcftp.html. This data also uses the North American 1983 Datum (NAD83) and an Albers Equal Area Conic projection. The metadata is available here. The data were available in ARC export format as a pkzipped archive. The data were produced in December of 1999 and were last modified in December of 2001.
   

The biogeoclimatic zone and park data were converted into coverages in ArcToolbox using ArcView Import from Interchange File in order to display them in ArcMap. They were also projected with the Projection Wizard into the same projection as the BTM data (UTM, NAD83). The projection had to be defined for the land use layers (lupg, luph, lupi, lupj) and the transportation layers (trnlg, trnlh, trnli, trnlj) of the BTM data using the Define Projection Wizard.

The land use classes used from the land use layer were old forests (140 years +), young forests, selectively logged forests, elevation, recently logged, recently burned, freshwater, urban, agriculture, snow and glaciers, mining, estuaries, salt water, agriculture residential mixtures, rangelands, recreation activities, wetlands, and barren surfaces. These were all selected by attributes and dissolved. The attributes with many records were selected and dissolved separately for each map sheet and then merged because dissolving a layer with thousands of records takes a long time. I put glaciers and snow, recently burned, mining, wetlands, salt water, estuaries, agriculture residential mixtures, rangelands, recreation activities, and barren surfaces into the same layer since I realized that they would be used only as constraints. I could have added the water and recently logged layers to this as well, but I did not realize this until later, so they were kept separate.

A layer was created that included old forest, young forest, and selectively logged forest, and a separate layer of old forest was created as well. The transportation shapefiles of each map sheet were also merged. Railroad, paved road, and gravel road attributes were selected and dissolved. The dissolve and merge functions created shapefiles from the selected layers, which could then be imported into IDRISI.

To create a file for elevation, the land use layer was dissolved by elevation and a new field called 'class' was created. Elevation was classified into the following 13 classes:

The CWH and IDF zones of the biogeoclimatic zone coverage were selected, dissolved, and merged in ArcMap as well. I clipped the resulting layer to the land use layer, but this created a line of empty values across the image when I converted it into raster. So, I created a new shapefile in ArcCatalog. In the new shapefile, a polygon was digitized along the boundaries of the land use layer. The biogeoclimatice zones were then successfully clipped to this polygon.

The parks data were dissolved by park name and clipped to the digitized polygon as well. All the data were then ready for conversion into IDRISI vector files.

The conversion into IDRISI vector files was carried out in IDRISI with the SHAPEIDR function. Conversion from vector to raster was then accomplished as shown in the following cartographic model:

The parameters (row and column number, reference system, min and max x and y) had to be input manually for the first file. I chose 1400 as the row and column number through trial and error. UTM NAD83 zone 10 was chosen as the reference system. I wasn't sure how to determine the min and max x and y coordinates, but I copied them from the vector file, and it worked! These coordinates are as follows:

x min = 427926

y min = 719346

x max = 5427938

y max = 5654036

The image below is the cartographic model for the conversion of ESRI shapefiles into IDRISI and the conversion from vector to raster for the roads and agriculture vector images. All the other vector images were converted the same way as the agriculture file.