Los Angeles County GIS Data Portal » Environmental

Significant Ecological Areas (SEA) – Existing/Adopted

nfranchino — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:08:28 +0000

Significant Ecological Areas (SEA)

Significant Ecological Areas (SEA) Significant Ecological Area (SEA) means an area that is determined to possess an example of biotic resources that cumulatively represent biological diversity for the purposes of protecting biotic diversity, as part of the Los Angeles County general plan or the city’s general plan. Additional regulations shall be applied based on County Code 22.56.215: Hillside management and significant ecological areas — Additional regulations.More information about the County’s SEA Program can be found at: http://planning.lacounty.gov/sea/

Data can be downloaded here:

Download Shapefile (.zip)
KMZ file

Significant Ridgelines (within CSDs)

Dan Hoffman — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:43:46 +0000

This layer delineates ridgelines within selected CSDs whereupon restrictions are established for grading and ridgeline development. For more information on specific CSDs where these ridgelines reside, click here.

Data can be downloaded here:

DRP_RIDGELINES (zipped shapefile)

Significant Ridgelines

National Forest

Dan Hoffman — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:55:30 +0000

Depicts lands owned or managed by the U.S. Forest Service and designated by U.S. Government as a National Forest. The Los Padres and Angeles National Forests lie within the boundaries of Los Angeles County.

Data can be downloaded here:

Download Shapefile / .zip

Sensitive Environmental Resource Areas (SERA)

Roman — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:17:47 +0000

Significant Environmental Resource Areas

Sensitive Environmental Resources (SERA) – Coast Zone Only

These are in the Coastal Zone area only, and they afford the highest protection from future land development due to their environmental signifigance and sensitivity. ESHA’s have the most restricction to development (only resource dependent uses allowed), and the remaining categories allow some development but with additional review from the Environmental Review Board. Please click here for the 1986 Malibu Land Use Plan; a description of SERAs and ESHAs begin on page 27 of the PDF, and a table listing permitted uses begins on page 75 of the PDF. Source: Malibu Local Coastal Plan; last update: 1986 (plan adopted).

Data can be downloaded here:

Download shapefile & layer file (.zip)

Fire_perimeters_1965-2011

timsmith66 — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:16:43 +0000

Fire Perimeters for Los Angeles County from 1965 to 2011. No attribute data for the years 1965-1968.fires1965-2011

Significant Ecological Areas (SEA) – Proposed

Roman — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:33:18 +0000

Proposed Significant Ecological Areas

Proposed updates to the Significant Ecological Areas are based on aerial imagery and parcels. Please note that proposed SEAs have not been officially adopted as part of the L.A. County General Plan. For the Existing/Adopted SEAs click here.

From the Los Angeles County Draft General Plan Map 6.2 (2011): Significant Ecological Areas and Coastal Resource Areas Policy Map identifies three areas of significance types; proposed SEAs, proposed ETAs and Coastal Resource Areas.

Proposed SEAs are subject to the SEA CUP, and the SEA Policies of the General Plan. A full list of the 27 Proposed SEAs is available here. Each SEA specific page has more information about that individual Proposed SEA and a full list of parcels located within it.

More information about the County’s SEA Program can be found at: http://planning.lacounty.gov/sea/
Data can be downloaded here:

Weather related GIS data

Mark Greninger — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 01:17:42 +0000

NOAA provides a wealth of GIS data, including updates of its weather predictions.

Here are some useful links:

The NWS GIS Data Portal, where you can download kml and shapefiles. From there, you can go to:
The NWS Web Services Page, where you can get the connection information for live mapping service that can be used in ArcMap. Also:
The nowCoast Information Depot, which has more metadata than you would ever need. It looks like they are using ArcIMS, which still works just fine!

Image Services

NowCoast Info

California Spatial Information Library (CaSIL)

Roman — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:09:29 +0000

The Cal-Atlas site facilitates the coordinated and sustainable development, maintenance, licensing and sharing of geospatial data and web map services by California government agencies, partners and stakeholders. California government agencies work with the California GIS Council, regional GIS collaboratives and the broader California GIS community to define the data architecture, systems, standards, agreements and processes for a fully integrated and effective California Spatial Data Infrastructure.

The link below is for downloadable GIS data found at the Cal-Atlas Geospatial Clearinghouse.

http://www.atlas.ca.gov/download.html#/casil

California Coastal Commission Zone Boundaries

Mark Greninger — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 19:31:09 +0000

The coastal zone, which was specifically mapped by the Legislature, covers an area larger than the State of Rhode Island. On land the coastal zone varies in width from several hundred feet in highly urbanized areas up to five miles in certain rural areas, and offshore the coastal zone includes a three-mile-wide band of ocean.

This data was downloaded from the CalTrans GIS Data Library, which is a valuable resource for this and other data.

For information about the Coastal Commission, please see their home page: http://www.coastal.ca.gov/whoweare.html

Samples

Data Download

World Climate Data (past, present, future)

Mark Greninger — Tue, 10 May 2011 01:58:17 +0000

WorldClim

WorldClim is a set of global climate layers (climate grids) with a spatial resolution of a square kilometer. They can be used for mapping and spatial modeling in a GIS or other computer programs. If you are not familiar with such programs, you can tryDIVA-GIS.

The database is documented in this article: Hijmans, R.J., S.E. Cameron, J.L. Parra, P.G. Jones and A. Jarvis, 2005. Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. International Journal of Climatology 25: 1965-1978.

The WorldClim database is under continuous development, please provide us with feedback if you find any problems. The current version is Version 1.4 (release 3). It is only marginally different from version 1.3.

Download

You can download climate data for:

Current conditions (interpolations of observed data, representative of 1950-2000)
Future conditions: IPCC 4 from CIAT (recommended) or the older IPPC 3 data (downscaled from global climate model (GCM) output)
Past conditions (downscaled global climate model output)

Soil Types

cchen — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:57:40 +0000

Abstract:

A polygon layer showing soil types in Los Angeles County. This layer shows the delineation and the county soil number (2-180). These soils have runoff coefficient curves associated with them found in the hydrology manual (http://ladpw.org/wrd/publication/) that allow an individual to determine how much runoff results from rainfall. This includes soils in the Antelope Valley. The layer was created by scanning the Department of Public Work’s Water Resources Division Soil maps.

Purpose:

For use in DPW’s Modified Rational Method Hydrology Model

Supplemental Information:

The latest version of this data is available at http://ladpw.org/wrd/publication/index.cfm

Data can be downloaded here

Solar Radiation Model (2006)

Mark Greninger — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 01:26:01 +0000

Solar Insolation (global radiation) for the County of Los Angeles developed from information captured in 2006 by the LAR-IAC program.

This data was created through the Area Solar Radiation function in ESRI’s ArcGIS Desktop. For more details about this function, view the ESRI help file. That function creates four output files:

Global radiation – Global radiation or total amount of incoming solar insolation (direct + diffuse) calculated for each location of the input surface.
Direct radiation – Direct incoming solar radiation for each location.
Diffuse radiat ion – Diffuse incoming solar radiation for each location.
Duration – Duration of direct incoming solar radiation

This dataset is the first output – global radiation.Values are watt-hours per square meter per year, and range from zero to over 2.6 million. Further analysis has determined that these values may be 28% low when compared to real-world test locations, at LAX and Long Beach Airport (Federal Solar Fact Sheets.) It is recommended that the values be scaled up by this percent to build accurate models.

There are two versions of this file. The first is the raster dataset, samples of which are shown below. The second version is a point file version, which converted each 5′ x 5′ grid into a single cell that could be assigned to a specific building and parcel, and aggregated for use in the LA county Solar Map. This point file is massive, and should not be viewed except at extremely large scales.

Samples

Countywide

Detail

This dataset was developed by the County of Los Angeles Chief Information Office in support of the LA County Solar Map Application (http://solarmap.lacounty.gov). It is a 5 foot by 5 foot raster grid that coveres all areas of the County that had the necessary data. This is the raw source data that includes includes the tops of trees, the ground, buildings, water, and all features. This means that features like the top of a tree will appear to be be a prime candidate for solar photovoltaic installation due to the amount of sunlight it received.

This dataset is perhaps the largest single solar radiation model in the world, consisting of over 300 million individual measurements.

For the solar map site itself, further processes were run to focus only on building roofs. This dataset includes ALL information, and can be used for determining solar potential for ground-based systems as well.

Data shown on the Solar Map included a number of other processing steps, which created a raster building dataset, which was used to mask this solar data to focus only on buildings.

Detailed Graphic view of processing steps (4.6 Mb .pdf file)

Important notes

This layer has been validated by various researches, and its values are accurate to within 4% when aggregated to the parcel level.

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) – 2006

Mark Greninger — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 23:21:55 +0000

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for the urban/suburban areas of the County of Los Angeles developed from information captured in 2006 by the LAR-IAC program.

The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is a simple numerical indicator that can be used to analyze remote sensing measurements, typically but not necessarily from a space platform, and assess whether the target being observed contains live green vegetation or not.

For more information on NDVI, read the wikipedia entry.

Samples

Countywide (click to enlarge)

Detailed View

This dataset was developed by the County of Los Angeles Chief Information Office in support of the LA County Solar Map Application (http://solarmap.lacounty.gov). A solar model based upon the high-resolution digital aerial elevation data included the tops of trees, the ground, and other features that would skew any solar results. For example – the top of a tree appeared to the solar model to be a prime candidate for solar photovoltaic installation due to the amount of sunlight it received, but this was obviously incorrect, and some way needed to be found to focus exclusively on building tops for the purpose of the site.

The trees were developed from the following data sources:

2006 Natural Color orthogonal imagery. Click here for more information
2006 Color Infrared (CIR) imagery at 4-inch resolution which contains the Red and Near Infrared (NIR) Bands. Click here for more information

NDVI values range between -1 and 1. Values > 0.1 are generally green vegetation, while values < 0.1 show things like buildings, streets, water and bare dirt.

Layer File (only works for County staff)

NDVI (2006) Layer File

Tree Canopy – Raster (2006 Data)

Mark Greninger — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 20:58:33 +0000

Tree Canopy for the urban/suburban areas of the County of Los Angeles developed from information captured in 2006 by the LAR-IAC program. This dataset was updated in October 2011 – see below for details.

Samples

Countywide

Detail View (click to enlarge)

Detail View with Imagery

The trees were developed from the following three data sources:

The Digital Elevation Model (DEM) which modeled the ground surface at 5-foot intervals. Click here for more information
The Digital Surface Model (DSM) which modeled the surface at 5-foot intervals, which included all features like trees and buildings. Click here for more information
The Color Infrared (CIR) imagery at 4-inch resolution which contains the Red and Near Infrared (NIR) Bands. Click here for more information

Processing steps:

A Surface Height Model was created by subtracting the DEM from the DSM: Click here for more information
A Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) model was created. Click here for more information. NDVI values range between -1 and 1. Values > 0.1 are generally green vegetation, while values < 0.1 show things like buildings, streets, water and bare dirt.
All areas where the surface height was greater than 8 feet, and the NDVI value was > 0.1 were extracted and assigned the value 1. This is the trees layer.

Detailed Graphic view of processing steps (4.6 Mb .pdf file)

Updated information (October 2011)

To provide improved symbolization of trees across the County, and to remove a number of artifacts, a set of additional processes were run.

The MajorityFilter command was run twice on the trees layer. For the options, I used 8 neighbors with the majority replacement threshold.
I created a copy of the result, then shifted it three feet to the east and south to establish a “shadow” effect, and assigned the shadow the value of 100. This will allow symbolization or removal of the shadow.
I merged the two rasters back together to create a single raster dataset with both the tree and shadow data in the same raster.

Samples showing before and after

Original

Updated

Important notes

This trees layer has been validated to provide a true representation of trees. However, the data includes many small processing artifacts, and should not be used for authoritative measuring.

Layer Files

Tree Canopy (2006) – Updated (ArcGIS 10 Layer File) - This will work only for users connected to the LA County Network.

This data is part of the LAR-IAC (http://planning.lacounty.gov/lariac) datasets, and if you want use access this information you will need to participate in LAR-IAC.