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FMMP - Water Bond Improvements 

California Water Bond Funds FMMP Improvements

The voters of California passed the Proposition 13 bond initiative in March 2000 entitled the Safe Drinking Water, Clean Water, Watershed Protection, and Flood Protection Act (Water Bond). A small component of this bond provided funding to FMMP to assist local land-use planning efforts by increasing its mapping capabilities and integrating FMMP data with other information. Through this effort, planners can work toward conserving valuable agricultural and watershed lands while reducing the risks of urban flooding or other natural resource hazards.   The funding supported completion of the following items:

Accelerating production of Important Farmland maps

  • Survey area additions are complete for Western Stanislaus and Western Fresno Counties, using new NRCS soil survey data.   Mendocino County is now available in draft format (2006 data).  

  • Butte, Colusa and western Tulare Counties were upgraded from Interim to Important Farmland status using new NRCS soil data.      

  • Digital soil survey data (SSURGO) from USDA has been incorporated to all existing Important Farmland maps during the 2002 and 2004 update cycles.   A system has been developed to test more recent releases of SSURGO data so that FMMP can mirror any revisions affecting agricultural categories into the future.      

Increasing coverage and availability of NRCS soil surveys

One-third of the annual funding from the Water Bond has been allocated to NRCS to accelerate soil mapping, digital- and paper- publication of new soil surveys, including:

  • Completion of soil mapping in Butte County.  

  • Print publication of the Western Stanislaus County soil survey.

  • Web site development for Colusa, Yolo, & Western Tulare surveys.

  • Soil mapping in Central Humboldt County and portions of Kern County is now underway.

Increasing data collection capabilities

  • FMMP, in conjunction with the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, initiated a project to map long-term agricultural easements in California. As individual easements are held by many different agencies and land trusts, the easement database can be used to strategically plan where to focus new conservation efforts.

  • GIS data exchange capabilities--all FMMP GIS data (1984 to 2006, visit our ftp site) is posted to the web in ESRI Shape file format--it can also be exported to different formats based on user requirements.   Additionally, FMMP incorporates GIS data from many organizations as a standard part of the mapping process, significantly improving spatial and classification accuracy of the Important Farmland Maps.  

  • FMMP is participating in interagency efforts to procure and share current imagery data. In combination with the above data sets, digital imagery is the primary way that changes in land use are documented by FMMP every two years.

Integrating FMMP data with planning, natural resource, and hazard related data to improve decisionmaking

  • A pilot GIS analysis of urbanization and agricultural land use change in FEMA floodplains is underway.

  • Pilot development of Land Capability Classification system maps, which provide complimentary assessment tools to the Important Farmland system, is underway.  

  • FMMP provides technical assistance to researchers who are using Important Farmland data in modeling future urban growth and assessing other environmental changes.   Communication with users is important in assuring proper use of the data and helps them in achieving appropriate results.

  • Similarly, FMMP is working with agencies that gather other agricultural statistics, such as the National Resources Inventory (NRI), to review processes and results. Opportunities for sharing resources or clarifying the usefulness of various data types for specific uses are being addressed.

  • Visualization tools are being used to show changes in land use as mapped by FMMP. These animations serve to graphically illustrate how much change has occurred over 20 years and provide a background for discussions on future conservation efforts.

Many of the items cited were on the FMMP ‘wish list' for years, and were made possible due to Water Bond funding. Some items are stand alone accomplishments, while others represent the ‘first stage' in a process, particularly those involving workflow improvements to increase accuracy and detail.

These improvements occur concurrently with the biennial map update cycle.   In this way, staff incorporates improvements with a practical approach that has enabled FMMP to report on land use change every two years since 1984.

CALFED Bay-Delta Program  |   NRCS California