Information Center for the Environment

The California Riparian Evaluation System (CARES) is a habitat evaluation tool designed to be used by decision makers who are not experienced with GIS. The current version was designed for the Wildlife Conservation Board of the California Department of Fish and Game to support their analysis of how riparian habitat restoration funds should be allocated. CARES, developed by the California Rivers Assessment (CARA) staff at the University of California, Davis, allows for the identification of riparian areas of high quality and diversity which are at risk or which have a high potential for conservation or restoration. The system is comprised of a state-of-the-art ArcView 3.0 graphical user interface through which users may alter evaluation criteria priorities to match conservation goals. The application operates by allowing users to specify a mapping of the domain of a coverage onto a [-1,1] score. The users may then specify relative weightings for each variable and construct a map of the normalized sum of the weighted scores. Results are displayed as ArcView shapefiles which highlight potential sites for conservation based on criteria chosen. Currently five data layers are available for inclusion in the user-defined criteria selection: Land Use/Land Cover, Land Management Status, Flow Regime (Natural or Altered), Potential Plant Species Richness, and Potential Vertebrate Species Richness. It is straightforward to add more layers to CARES as requested by users. The CARES system has recently been ported to Spatial Analyst which dramatically reduces processing time.