Expert panels develop recommendations to standardize, streamline coastal habitat mapping in California

A series of expert advisory panels convened by SCCWRP and its partners has developed recommendations for how California can streamline and standardize the process by which coastal habitats get mapped in California – part of an ongoing effort to develop a more continuous, parsimonious process for keeping maps of coastal habitats up to date and relevant for supporting management decisions.

The recommendations, finalized in May, are intended to improve California’s ability to do routine, consistent, sustainable mapping of four coastal habitats: rocky intertidal areas, coastal wetlands/estuaries, eelgrass beds, and beaches and dunes. The recommendations cover how to define habitat boundaries, collect and analyze data, and produce annual updates to maps in a routine and cost-effective manner.

The maps – which document key habitat features, including boundaries, topography, and relationships to adjacent habitats – are foundational in building California’s capacity to monitor the long-term resiliency of coastal habitats to sea level rise and climate change. Because mapping is done at different times and varying frequencies, maps of California coastal habitats tend to be perpetually outdated, which can slow down progress on coastal restoration projects and impede managers’ ability to evaluate restoration success.

The California Ocean Protection Council and other agencies are planning to use the panels’ recommendations to explore how to enable routine coastal mapping; the recommendations also provide guidance for agencies that are currently doing coastal habitat mapping.