Recipient Organization
STATE UNIV OF NEW YORK
(N/A)
SYRACUSE,NY 13210
Performing Department
Natural Heritage Program
Non Technical Summary
The New York Natural Heritage Program will work with the Natural Areas Conservancy and theirpartners to improve the utility of NAC vegetation plot data and the Ecological Community Map (ECM)that will ensure wider understanding and usage of these products and their derivatives by natural areasmanagers throughout New York City.Awarded Start Date: 8/1/15End Date: 6/30/16 (as of 8/26/16)Sponsor Name: Natural Areas Conservancy
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Scope of ProjectThe New York Natural Heritage Program will work with the Natural Areas Conservancy and theirpartners to improve the utility of NAC vegetation plot data and the Ecological Community Map (ECM)that will ensure wider understanding and usage of these products and their derivatives by natural areasmanagers throughout New York City.This will be accomplished through the following task.Analyze NAC Ecological Assessment 2013 and 2014 Upland plot data to create a list of VegetationAssociations on Parks-owned natural areas and keys to classifying these Associations. Classify eachplot to one of these Association types.
Project Methods
a. Data sharingNAC will provide plot data collected within Parks-owned natural areas representing the currentvegetation condition of the sampled location. Under direction of NYNHP, NAC will deliver formatteddata so that the list of species and their relative abundance can be rapidly viewed and assessed for eachplot (1124 total) and so that extra annotations can be applied to each plot by NYNHP. NYNHP willprovide this cleaned-up and annotated version to NAC.b. Rapid grouping and classification meetingUsing existing keys developed for the North Atlantic Coast Ecoregion and other relevant regional efforts,NYNHP will manually assign a National Vegetation Classification (NVC) Association to each vegetationplot. This first "go-through" will be a relatively rapid effort, with plots not fitting cleanly into the keys setaside. To help discern natural groupings of vegetation Associations NYNHP will also apply vegetationecology statistics (such as multivariate classification tools) to the same plot data. NYNHP willcommunicate with NAC after this first rapid grouping effort to discuss difficult classification plots, themost common groupings, and any other issues that may have arisen. Potential issues include, but arenot limited to, situations where a plot may document many invasive species but may still containenough native species to be grouped into a recognizable Association, or conversely, situations where theplot may not be able to be grouped into a recognizable Association.c. Finalize groupings, edit keys, share findingsBased on the results of the classification decisions, NYNHP will finalize NVC Association assignments foreach assignable plot. We expect that there will be Associations new to the NVC and ECM classification.For these, NYNHP will generate short descriptions and add these new Associations to a final, compiledkey to Associations for the Parks-owned natural areas. NYNHP will summarize the final list ofAssociations and patterns in plot data in a report.