Background
This collaborative maintains a system of forest stewardship plots in the Santa Cruz Mountains that were collected using the Full Stewardship Trends Monitoring Protocol. This protocol and data collection interface were collaboratively developed through a partnership of managers, researchers, and landowners focused on standardized, long-term, and accessible monitoring of forest stewardship activities in the coast redwood and associated forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Plot Distribution
At present, we have collected forest monitoring and research data following the standardized protocol at 304 plots across 14 sites in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A web map with plot locations and a factsheet detailing each sampling site’s ecology, existing, and planned stewardship activities is expected to be released in the Spring of 2026.
Sites are permanently marked with center stake, three witness trees, and GPS locations with accuracy of +/- 2 meters accuracy. Most of our plots are collected in the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forest type, with a subset collected in black oak (Quercus kelloggii) and mixed evergreen forest types.
Data collection is conducted across 1/10th acre plots, and includes:
- Tree and sapling inventory (status, species, DBH)
- Regeneration (seedling and sprouting) counts by size class
- Fuels (two Brown’s transects per plot)
- Limited fire effects information (species specific responses)
- Canopy cover
- Shrub cover and composition
- Vegetation composition
- Groundcover by class
- Watch-List Species Presence
- All sites have directional and 360° photographs
A subset of these plots will be revisited in 2027 following stewardship activities, such as prescribed fire, timber harvest, mastication, thinning, and fuel reduction. This will result in a before-after comparison, and in some cases, before-after-control of the influence of stewardship activities over time.
Data Availability
The central goal of this project is to spur long-term research on forest dynamics and the influence of forest stewardship activities in coast redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains. As such, most of these data will be made open-access following the completion of the project, when full quality-control, summarization, and metadata have been completed.
In the interim, researchers and graduate students are encouraged to reach out to discuss early access to all or parts of the dataset to pursue specific research questions. Site access and remeasurements are facilitated through individual landowners. Do not attempt to access research sites without written permission and permitting from the landowner.