OakQuest 2018 polygon patches

This release, OakQuest 2018 (version III), of the Intertwine Alliance's OakQuest data incorporates both of the previous versions I (2016) and II (2017) data releases, minor edits to these previous versions, as well as new data.

With this 2018 release, we consider the whole of the Oregon portion of the RCS planning area complete. The oak map shows concentrations of oak and places where oak is absent. We have “full coverage” of 1,790 sq. miles within Oregon. T he term “full coverage” is used as we have learned that it is as important both to know where the oaks are and where they are not, in order to plan larger-scale work such as connectivity corridors for plants and wildlife. This is area we are confident that where we said there is oak there is oak and where we have no oak we feel confident we haven ’ t ’ missed any significant clusters of oaks. The additional 855 sq. miles within the RCS planning boundary has been spot checked and we feel confident this habitat is not conducive for oaks to grow. Small portions within the state of Washington have been collected but are not included in this release. We hope this information will be funded soon and that we can provide a future release of OakQuest data.

The polygons were derived by buffering the 290,000 oak points with an 80 foot radius and then shrinking these buffered polygons by 50 feet. We did this to cluster the polygons which were just outside of the 30 individual foot buffers. The resulting polygon features, improves the performance of viewing this vast amount of data. There are almost 33,000 polygons, about 25% of these are over a ¼ acre in size and 9% of these are over 2 acres in size.

This is just one way to take this information and view it across this landscape, we will be working with the OPWG to better understand the value of now having the OakQuest 2018 data available.