Coastal Services Center

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Habitat Restoration: Support to the Southern California Wetlands Recovery Project

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What Is the Wetland Recovery Project?

The Southern California Wetlands Recovery Project (WRP) is a partnership of public agencies working cooperatively to acquire, restore, and enhance coastal wetlands and watersheds between Point Conception, California and the U.S. border with Mexico (Figure 1). This area includes the five coastal counties of Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego. There are sixteen public agencies with responsibilities for coastal wetlands and watersheds in Southern California that participate in the project. The WRP is using a nonregulatory approach with an ecosystem perspective to

• identify wetland acquisition and restoration priorities,
• prepare plans for these priority sites,
• pool funds to undertake these projects,
• implement priority plans, and
• oversee post-project maintenance and monitoring.

The WRP management structure (Figure 2) consists of a governing board, a managers group, a public advisory committee, a science advisory panel, and five county task forces.

How Is the NOAA Coastal Services Center (Center) Contributing?

Decision-Support Tools that Support the Planning and Site Prioritization Goals of the WRP (SCREAM)

The Center's Landscape Characterization and Restoration (LCR) program is currently working in cooperation with the WRP Science Advisory Panel to develop an assessment framework for riparian habitats in Southern California. The objectives are to

• Conduct a regional-scale assessment of riparian areas to evaluate the functional contribution of habitat, hydrology, and biogeochemistry to the watershed.
• Incorporate this methodology into a user-friendly, geographic information system (GIS)-based decision-support tool to strengthen local and regional planning of recovery efforts.

The assessment framework has been developed and is currently in review and initial system designing stages. The initial software development phase began in the spring of 2003. SCREAM is currently scheduled for completion in the Summer of 2006. Pilot watersheds or subwatersheds have been selected from each county (Figure 3).

Sample vegetative cover metric results are available for each of the pilot watersheds.

Carpenteria Creek, Santa Barbara County

Ventura River, Ventura County

San Gabriel River, Los Angeles County

San Diego Creek, Orange County

Escondido Creek, San Diego County

Regional Topographic Data Coverage – IfSAR

The Center's Coastal Remote Sensing (CRS) program has contracted with Earth Data International / GeoSAR to develop topographic data for Southern California using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (IfSAR). The five coastal counties of the project, offshore islands, and watershed that extend into Riverside and San Bernardino Counties will be included, covering an area over 40,000 square kilometers. The IfSAR data are being collected to support the decision-support tool.

The final digital elevation model (DEM) will have 5-meter postings with ±1.6 meter vertical accuracy and ±2.5 meter horizontal accuracy. Two radar frequencies will be acquired (X-band and P-band). The P-band will be acquired for the entire region; however, it will only be processed for a 300 square mile portion of the Ventura River Watershed. The X-band data set will be processed for the entire 40,000 square kilometer region.

Data collection occurred in 2002 and is now available to the public via the IfSAR Data Viewer.

California C-CAP Data and the Southern California Regional Land Cover / Land Use Data

The Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) is a national effort by the Center to develop and distribute regional land cover and change analysis data for the coastal zone by using remote sensing technology. C-CAP classifies land cover types into 22 standardized classes that include forested areas, urban areas, and wetlands.

In support of WRP, C-CAP has classified the 2001 satellite images into 45 land use and land cover classes. Each category further refines the land cover and data available within a C-CAP analysis. Examples of the categories include identifying high density residential, commercial, and industrial developed land, golf courses, parks, row crops, and orchards.

Download the California C-CAP

Download the Southern California Regional Land Cover / Land Use Data

Compiling Existing Data and Riparian Area Delineation

With grant support from NOAA, the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP) is compiling existing data for five pilot watersheds and identify major data gaps for the landscape-scale assessment framework. A standardized methodology for delineating the riparian boundary in high, moderate, and low gradient stream reaches will be developed and applied in the five pilot watersheds. High-resolution (e.g., IKONOS, QuickBird) remote sensing data will be used to map riparian vegetation within the five pilot watersheds. A cost-benefit analysis will be used to compare the utility of using existing land use cover versus higher resolution data to map riparian vegetation in at least one watershed.

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