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Prioritizing land conservation in Eastern Alameda County January 2018 SCOPE OF WORK: Prioritizing Conservation Purchases The Altamont Landfill Open Space Advisory Committee's(ALOSAC)goal is to obtain an objective ranking and scoring of parcels with the potential to be purchased for conservation. This list will be used to: 1. Highlight areas in the county where conservation opportunities exist. 2. Guide purchasing decisions for the Altamont Landfill Open Space Advisory Committee. 3. Outreach to land owners who may be interested in working with the Altamont Landfill Opens Space Advisory Committee. The initial scope of work will focus on scoring and ranking parcels for their contributions to biodiversity, viewshed, and community desires as well as new factors that may emerge during our research.To ensure objectivity, UC Berkeley will maintain broad discretion in formulating the methodology and analysis necessary to complete the scoring and ranking. However, we seek a collaborative approach for this project, keeping in close touch with ALOSAC throughout and sharing our information, progress,and methods. At the end of each step outlined below, before we will hold a meeting with the adivosry committee or subcommittee.At least three such meetings will take place during the project. This project will use available information about habitat, biodiversity and viewshed status in Eastern Alameda County. Little or no new data will be generated in this project, rather the intellectual advancement will be the combing, scoring, ranking, and synthesizing existing datasets to create new knowledge.Throughout the project UC Berkeley will communicate data needs with Alameda County. Steps and methods: Building a database of biodiversity and habitat The first step in prioritizing parcels for conservation is having a thorough understanding of the contributions each parcel makes to biodiversity and habitat. Doing so requires combining many spatial datasets which contain information relevant to biodiversity or habitat values. Such datasets include: land cover, vegetation cover, presence of rare animals, presences of rare plants,a parcels contribution to habitat connectivity,and location of a parcel relative to other preserved open space. Many such datasets already exist,and other dataset(such as the distance to other protected areas)can be generated by the research team. Calculating scenic values Calculating the scenic value of each parcel can be done using GIS software and input datasets on elevation, slope,land cover and population density. For each parcel we will calculate the area within the county from which the parcel can be seen (i.e. hill tops can be seen from more of the county and valley floors),estimate the population that can see the parcel,and what is seen on the parcel (i.e., is it open space or is it housing). Integrating community priority areas