Vegetation - Delta Vegetation and Land Use Update - 2016 [ds2855]

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Reform Act of 2009 established the Delta Stewardship Council (DSC) to achieve more effective governance while providing for the sustainable management of the Delta ecosystem and a more reliable water supply, using an adaptive management framework. Vegetation and land use are mapped for the 737,621 acres constituting the Legal Delta portion of the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta area. The current effort produced a digital map covering 737,621 acres considered to be the Legal Delta Area. 2016 National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) 1-meter resolution imagery was used to delineate line work and attribute polygons. The 2019 map is a re-map of the 2007 effort. This map retained the line work and attributes of the 2007 mapping when static and was amended in areas where change occurred. Change detection was done comparing 723,426 acres, which were identical in the 2007 (2005 base imagery) and 2019 (2016 base imagery) efforts. GIC utilized the key produced for the 2007 mapping effort, in conjunction with the 2009 Central Valley key, as well as the CNPS membership rules online to determine classification levels and vegetation communities. Vegetation mapping is to alliance level when possible, otherwise it is left at group level (based on the National Vegetation Classification Standard, see http://biology.usgs.gov/npsveg/nvcs.html); land use is mapped to Anderson Level 2 classification (see https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/0964/report.pdf). The map classification is based on a vegetation classification derived from field data collected in summer and fall of 2005 produced by the Vegetation Classification and Mapping Program (VegCAMP) of the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Membership rules for each alliance can be found at http://vegetation.cnps.org/. 2016 National Agricultural Inventory Program (NAIP) one meter orthoimagery was the baseline imagery used. Google Earth imagery was used as supplemental imagery. Natural vegetation comprises approximately 17% of the Delta study area, 65% is agriculture and pasture, 10% is urban/other and 8% is open water. The minimum mapping unit was 250 acres (100 ha). Link to download report: https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=174866.