Santa Rosa Plain Wetlands Profile: A Demonstration of WRAMP

The Santa Rosa Plain WRAMP project demonstrated the use of the State’s standardized monitoring and assessment tools in a North Coast watershed setting and described how the results can be used to support watershed based management and planning decisions to protect and manage the state’s wetland resources at a landscape scale. Use of the watershed approach presumes that optimal environmental benefits are achieved by sustaining and improving the overall abundance, diversity and condition of aquatic resources in a landscape context.
The Santa Rosa Plain WRAMP project focused on developing a landscape level, base line assessment of the aquatic resources in the study area by addressing the following question: what are the abundance, diversity, and ecological conditions of wetlands, streams, and their riparian areas within the Santa Rosa Plain?
Project tasks included:
- Developing a detailed GIS map of the aquatic features within the study area the Bay Area Aquatic Resources Inventory (BAARI) mapping protocols, and further developing the methods for local aquatic features not previously mapped in BAARI. The mapping methods are documented here.
- Conducting field assessment to characterize the ecological condition of the streams, depressions and sloped wetlands within the study area.
- Three separate probability based sample draws were developed using the EPA’s Generalized Random Tessellation Stratified (GRTS) spatially-balanced sampling methods.
- Condition assessments were conducted using the California Rapid Assessment Method for wetlands (CRAM) ~ 30 sites for each wetland type.
- Assessing and reporting on the distribution, abundance, diversity, and condition of wetlands, streams, and their riparian areas within the Santa Rosa Plain, based on the level-1 aquatic resources base map and the CRAM stream assessments.
The Final Project Report, further describes how WRAMP monitoring and assessment methods and online reporting tools support comprehensive watershed-based approaches to wetland impact avoidance, minimization, compensatory mitigation, assessment, and reporting.
Collins, J.N., S. Lowe, S. Pearce, and C. Roberts (2014). Santa Rosa Plain Wetlands Profile: A Demonstration of the California Wetland and Riparian Area Monitoring Plan. Final Report prepared for the California Natural Resources Agency - STD Agreement # 0CA10043-2. San Francisco Estuary Institute & Aquatic Science Center, Richmond. CA. SFEI Contribution # 724.
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