Vegetation - Gaviota Coast Dangermond Preserve [ds2957]

WRA, Inc (WRA) created a fine-scale vegetation map of portions of the Cojo-Jalama Ranches. WRA conducted field reconnaissance assistance for this project, as well as accuracy assessment (AA) field data collection. The primary purpose of the project was to provide a comprehensive overview of habitats, plants, and wildlife to inform planning for land-use, conservation, and ranch-specific activities.The mapping study area, consists of approximately 24,400 acres of the Cojo-Jalama ranches in unicoporated coastal Santa Barbara County, California. Work was performed on the project between 2012 and 2017. Ranch-wide floristic surveying was conducted from April 2012 to October 2014 to address natural communities and sensitive plant and wildlife species. WRA botanists documented vegetation alliances while on-foot. Site-specific surveys were conducted between 2015 and 2017 collected natural community and sensitive species data to be incorporated into WRA’s long-term geodatabase as supplementary data. WRA botanists then further refined vegetation alliance mapping by conducting accuracy assessment where site-specific surveys were conducted; when terrain made sites inaccessible, field botanists used binoculars to observe plant communities from an appropriate vantage point.Field maps generated by WRA used high-quality aerial photographs from 2010 to 2012 overlain with 10-foot contour lines. vegetation polygons were then hand-drawn by field biologists and later digitized using ArcGIS software. Trimble Geo XH GPS units with sub-meter accuracy were used by the biologists to map especially small-scale landscape features and rare plant point-occurrences. The minimum mapping unit (MMU) is variable from 1.0 acres to point depending on the map feature type. There was a total of 50 mapping classes. The overall Fuzzy Accuracy Assessment rating for the final vegetation map was not calculated, but much of the map was field checked.