Santa Cruz County is home to an amazing wealth of native species, including more than 1,200 plant species, and innumerable animals, fungi, and other life forms.
The high level of biodiversity is a bit of a surprise, given that our county is the state’s second smallest in area, and that much of it is dominated by coast redwood and mixed evergreen forests. But our variable soils and climate combine to create a mosaic of habitats, from windswept dunes to more than 3,000-foot-tall mountains, which support unique and diverse communities of plants and animals. These natural systems not only enrich our lives but also provide a suite of important ‘ecosystem services’, including filtering our water and sequestering carbon dioxide.
The Conservation Blueprint will use geographic information system (GIS) models informed by the county’s leading biodiversity experts, to determine land conservation priorities to protect native species, communities, and functioning ecosystems throughout the county. It will also identify techniques to address factors that threaten biodiversity even within protected reserves. In doing so, it will inform conservation of our natural systems, some of which, like the Santa Cruz Sandhills, are found nowhere else in the world.
You can download a word document for a partial list of GIS Data used in watershed and biodiversity planning from the Libary to the right.
The maps listed below and downloadable from the Libary to the right, show you the range of vegetation types in our County, from the globally rare (like the Sandhills) to the dominant type (redwood):
- Globally rare vegetation
- Locally significant vegetation
- Common vegetation
- Dominant vegetation
