Description: Oregon white oak and native prairie have been identified as priority habitats for years by numerous federal, state, regional and local agencies due to steep declines in the amount of remaining habitat. However, the lack of spatially explicit data hampers efforts to model these priority habitats for conservation, restoration and management. To address these issues, the Oak Prairie Work Group (OPWG) formed shortly before the Intertwine Alliance’s Portland-Vancouver Regional Conservation Strategy was released in 2012 (www.regionalconservationstrategy.org).
Today the OPWG is active and well-established, comprised of more than 30 organizational partners who meet quarterly. A strategic action plan has been developed to guide the group’s work; and a spatial data subgroup has completed a regional oak location map. . The first and second oak map data releases occurred in 2016 and 2017, respectively. This third data release replaces these previous versions and includes over 290,000 point locations for Oregon white oak across the Oregon portion of the Regional Conservation Strategy planning area.
This point data set represents both where Oregon White Oak has been detected as well as where there is no significant oak presently detected. We placed points where we were confident the tree canopy was Oak. We were conservative as we didn’t want to portray false positives, realizing we likely omitted some small oaks, some mixed forest oaks, and some individual trees. The points do not represent individual stems.
Copyright Text: Members of the Oak Prairie Work Group (OPWG; a project of The Intertwine Alliance) completed much of the digitizing and compilation of this data. The original oak field observations were collected by community members during the 2014-15 OakQuest community science effort. Lori Hennings (Metro) and Ted Labbe (Urban Greenspaces Institute) digitized most of the remaining oak point locations, with assistance from Carter Hoffman (independent contractor to UGI), Nesieka Breck (Metro intern), as well as Janelle St. Pierre and Pat Welle (volunteers). Tommy Albo (Metro) compiled the data and prepared it for release. Savahna Jackson and Sequoia Breck (Portland State University Indigenous Nations Studies) helped organize and lead OakQuest community science volunteers during summers 2014 and 2015.