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The Tamalpais Lands Collaborative (One Tam; https://www.onetam.org/), the network of organizations that manage lands on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, initiated the countywide mapping project with their interest in creating a seamless, comprehensive map depicting vegetation communities across the landscape. With support from their non-profit partner the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (https://www.parksconservancy.org/) One Tam was able to build a consortium to fund and implement the countywide fine scale vegetation map.
Development of the Marin fine-scale vegetation map was managed by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and staffed by personnel from Tukman Geospatial (https://tukmangeospatial.com/) Aerial Information Systems (AIS; http://www.aisgis.com/), and Kass Green and Associates. The fine-scale vegetation map effort included field surveys by a team of trained botanists. Data from these surveys, combined with older surveys from previous efforts, were analyzed by the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) Vegetation Program (https://www.cnps.org/vegetation) with support from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Vegetation Classification and Mapping Program (VegCAMP; https://wildlife.ca.gov/Data/VegCAMP) to develop a Marin County-specific vegetation classification.
High density lidar data was obtained countywide in the early winter of 2019 to support the project. The lidar point cloud, and many of its derivatives, were used extensively during the process of developing the fine-scale vegetation and habitat map. The lidar data was used in conjunction with optical data. Optical data used throughout the project included 6-inch resolution airborne 4-band imagery collected in the summer of 2018, as well as 6-inch imagery from 2014 and various dates of National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery.
In 2019, a 26-class lifeform map was produced which serves as the foundation for the much more floristically detailed fine-scale vegetation and habitat map. The lifeform map was developed using expert systems rulesets in Trimble Ecognition®, followed by manual editing.
In 2019, Tukman Geospatial staff and partners conducted countywide reconnaissance fieldwork to support fine-scale mapping. Field-collected data were used to train automated machine learning algorithms, which produced a fully automated countywide fine-scale vegetation and habitat map. Throughout 2020, AIS manually edited the fine-scale maps, and Tukman Geospatial and AIS went to the field for validation trips to inform and improve the manual editing process. In the spring of 2021, draft maps were distributed and reviewed by Marin County's community of land managers and by the funders of the project. Input from these groups was used to further refine the map. The countywide fine-scale vegetation map and related data products were made public in June 2021. In total, 107 vegetation classes were mapped with a minimum mapping size of one fifth to one acre, varying by class.
Accuracy assessment plot data were collected in 2019, 2020, and 2021. Accuracy assessment results were compiled and analyzed in the summer of 2021. Overall accuracy of the lifeformmap is 95%. Overall accuracy of the fine-scale vegetation map is 77%, with an overall 'fuzzy' accuracy of 81%.
The Marin County fine-scale vegetation map was designed for a broad audience for use at many floristic and spatial scales. At its most floristically resolute scale, the fine-scale vegetation map depicts the landscape at the National Vegetation Classification alliance level - which characterizes stands of vegetation generally by the dominant species present. This product is useful to managers interested in specific information about vegetation composition. For those interested in general land use and land cover, the lifeform map may be more appropriate. Tomake the information contained in the map accessible to the most users, the vegetation map is published as a suite of GIS deliverables available in a number of formats. Map products are being made available wherever possible by the project stakeholders, including the regional data portal Pacific Veg Map (http://pacificvegmap.org/data-downloads).