Many of California's counties and incorporated areas have large areas of wildlands including rare plants, valuable riparian areas, critical wildlife corridors, and remarkably intact native vegetation. These lands are uniquely under attack not so much from the inevitably of settlement by a rapidly expanding population as by decision making during the planning process. It is important to East-West Forestry Associates that planners, tree boards, politicians, and urban forest managers have a full suite of information before them--and we can help by providing your city with a natural resource GIS layer, vegetation type maps, forest inventories and biological resource protection guidelines.
As an example, we use sophisticated GIS tools to create polygon boundaries for vegetation type maps (shown below). (continued below....)
We then carefully ground truth the area, classify the imagery and perform accuracy assessments on the resulting map. Then we can create analyses similar to the one shown below, which summarizes attributes of trees in an urban area. (continued below....)
Further ground-based biological and tree information may be required. Therefore a grid of survey plots may be created. Ground
survey plots may be selected for analyses based on random sampling by "stratum" from the survey grid developed as shown below.
Such a process, adapted to your city's needs, can provide needed and lasting planning information. The resulting GIS biological inventories are usually developed using standards of mapping--WHR, Calveg, CNPS, NGDC or other established methodologies.
For more information please call Tom Gaman at East-West Forestry Associates (415) 669 7100 to discuss your particular application.
East-West Forestry Biological Survey/ FIA & CVS Data Management