Mineral groups identified through automated analysis of remote sensing data acquired by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) were used to generate a map showing the type and spatial distribution of hydrothermal alteration, other exposed mineral groups, and green vegetation across the northwestern conterminous United States. Boolean algebra was used to combine mineral groups identified through analysis of visible, near-infrared, and shortwave-infrared ASTER data into attributed alteration types and mineral classes based on common mineralogical definitions of such types and the minerals present within the mineral groups. Alteration types modeled in this way can be stratified relative to acid producing and neutralizing potential to aid in geoenvironmental watershed studies. This mapping was performed in support of multidisciplinary studies involving the predictive modeling of mineral deposit occurrence and geochemical environments at watershed to regional scales. These studies seek to determine the relative effects of mining and non-anthropogenic hydrothermal alteration on watershed surface water geochemistry and faunal populations. The presence or absence of hydrothermally-altered rocks and (or) specific mineral groups can be used to model the favorability of occurrence of certain types of mineral deposits, and aid in the delineation of permissive tracts for these deposits. These data were used as a data source for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Sagebrush Mineral-Resource Assessment (SaMiRA). This map, in ERDAS Imagine (.img) format, has been attributed by pixel value with material identification data that can be queried in most image processing and GIS software packages. Three files are included with this product: file with .img extension contains thematic image attributes and geographic projection data, file with .ige extension contains the raster data, and the file with .rrd extension includes pyramid data for fast display.
