Biodiversity Explorer User Guide

This guide introduces the Biodiversity Explorer and familiarizes users with key features and capabilities.

April 15, 2022

Purple, yellow, and white wildflowers bloom across a sandy landscape at the Desert Lily Preserve, against a backdrop of distant mountains and a lightly cloudy sky, with the sun shining over the horizon.

Introduction

About the Explorer

The CA Nature team developed the Biodiversity Explorer as part of a suite of interactive mapping and visualization tools compiling statewide biodiversity, access, climate and conservation information to advance California's commitment to conserve 30 percent of our lands and coastal waters by 2030, known as the 30×30 initiative.

Learn More about CA Nature

This guide will help you learn:

Dataset themes from the Areas of Conservation Emphasis (ACE) project, CDFW

The basics of how to use the Biodiversity Explorer map viewer and explore Areas of Conservation Emphasis

Delve into data on habitat and land cover types across the state

Where to learn more about the state's 30x30 initiative & how to get involved

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Close-up view of red and light green succulents with branching stems topped by yellow flowers, known as Bluff Lettuce, covering the rugged coastline that overlooks Point Arena Stornetta rock formations protruding from the ocean just off the coast.

Close-up view of wildflowers, including poppies, lupines and purple owl's clover, at North Table Mountain Ecological Reserve against a clear blue sky.

The Sacramento River rushes around a bend, amid lush riparian vegetation and moss covered rocks on either side of the riverbed. Dense trees cover a hillside in the background.

Close-up view of a fruiting desert almond plant.

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Animated GIF that highlights the Biodiversity Explorer App’s table of contents pane on the left side of the dashboard, showing an embedded box that appears and disappears to highlight each principal theme’s title and bar chart in sequence.

Animated GIF of the Biodiversity Explorer App that shows the process of zooming in on a selected area of interest, represented by a circle that has a yellow point at the centroid and a radius line connecting to another yellow point at the outline of the circle.

Misty water flowing over rocky creekbed at Bartlett Creek in Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument.

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Yellow-colored finch standing on a bush against a blue background.

Group of Sandhill Cranes wading in a wetland habitat at the Cosumnes River Preserve.

View looking upward at a canopy of yellow-colored aspen trees against a blue sky in the Conway Summit Area of Critical Environmental Concern.

Foreground shows a reddish rocky landscape that rise in front of a layer of low-lying clouds. In the background, a snowy, blue-colored mountain landscape rises above the clouds against a misty sky.

Animated GIF of the Biodiversity Explorer Habitat and Land Cover dashboard with an embedded box highlighting the ‘Habitat and Land Cover’ button at the top of the screen, which takes users to the Habitat and Land Cover dashboard.

Animated GIF of the Biodiversity Explorer Habitat and Land Cover dashboard with an embedded box that first highlights the “Select a County” filter menu and then the “Select an Ecoregion” filter menu in the panel on the left of the dashboard.

Animated GIF of the Biodiversity Explorer Habitat and Land Cover dashboard with an embedded box highlighting the various tabs across the bottom of the screen which allow users to view different land cover types, then showing the dashboard’s detailed view for the Hardwood Forest land cover type.

Explore a Spectrum of Conservation Approaches within 30x30

Meaningful conservation that contributes to California's 30x30 goal occurs in many forms across a broad spectrum of ecosystems, from strict protected areas, to working lands and waters. California’s vast array of landscapes all play important roles in biodiversity conservation, climate action, and access. Together, they create a mosaic of conserved areas working synergistically to support connectivity and redundancy—two key components of resilience.

To learn more about 30x30 and climate smart land management, visit our website at CaliforniaNature.ca.gov .

Additional Resources:

Biodiversity Explorer

The Biodiversity Explorer is a set of maps and summary information on species, natural communities, and habitat types tracked by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). Information is drawn from the Areas of Conservation Emphasis (ACE) project, and multiple vegetation mapping efforts across the state. A user can define an area of interest within an ecoregion to concurrently view aggregated landscape rankings from several ACE biodiversity indices, or view statistics on the conservation status of habitat types from within the Habitat and Land Cover dashboard. ACE contains over 62 data-rich map layers with information on predicted species presence, verified species occurrence locations for special management status species, and additional ecological elements such as Significant Habitats, Climate Resilience, and Connectivity. All ACE layers are available for exploration through the CDFW hosted ACE Viewer. ACE data products help to inform a variety of stakeholders involved in land use planning and conservation decision making. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CALFIRE) Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP), in cooperation with California Department of Fish and Wildlife VegCAMP program, with extensive use of USDA Forest Service Region 5 Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSL) data, has compiled the "best available" land cover data available for California into a single comprehensive statewide dataset known as FVEG. CDFW has modified FVEG for use in the Habitat and Land Cover dashboard, to reclassify many upland areas within patchy wetland complexes as 'wetland' to bring attention to the importance of these areas within wetland systems.

https://experience.arcgis.com

Learn More about 30x30

The State of California is expanding nature-based solutions and is committed to the goal of protecting 30 percent of the state's land and coastal waters by 2030.

https://www.californianature.ca.gov