[APWG] Need to get those measurments from the pristine native areas

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne and All,

Thanks for your email, and kind remarks.

In the near future, in order to be able to convert wildland non-riparian
weed areas, back to 100% local native plant cover, we need to start
figuring out what the mathematical constants are for the native species
compositions for the ecosystems we are working on.

And the purpose of getting these mathematical constants, is so that our
work can achieve high ecological restoration Performance Standards, like
100% native cover, and zero weeds, within 90 days or less, for example.

There are several ways to figure out what the pre-1492 ecosystem species
percentage-compositions looked like.

OLD PHOTOS like what Dr. Humphrey found from the 1890s at
http://www.ecoseeds.com/desertgrass.html and then went out to see what was
left, and how it had changed.  And especially valuable are photos like
Humphrey’s where the photos were taken from known points.

NEW PHOTOS.  You can also go out and look for pristine areas, measure the
percentage cover of each species, and photograph them.

You can see some picture that I took with our State Archeologist at the
time, at http://www.ecoseeds.com/mojave.html when we were searching for
the remains of the native grasslands of Anza Borrego State Park, and how
we propose that the native ecosystem changed over time, from grazing.

WEB PHOTOS of ecosystems, at certain known points.  There is a awesome
website to travel to any point on the planet where a degree of latitude
and longitude meet on land, at http://www.confluence.org.

For example, you could download the Confluence photos in a particular
direction, like north to south or west to each, and string them together
to form a huge photo ecosystem and vegetation Megatransect?

OLD MOVIES. I have been looking at all the old John Wayne movies that I
can get my hands on, because we had a catastrophic drought in California
at the same time the Dust Bowl was happening in the high plain states,
1930 to 1935, at the same time that John Wayne started his acting career. 
There is almost always a chase scene in those films on horses, so you can
see a lot of southern California coast rage and desert ecosystem
panoramas.

In old cowboy films, I do not want to see the actors or the story, but I
want to see the ecosystem that the movie is set in, and how much dust from
the bare spaces between the plants, their horses and cows are kicking up,
and see what species of grass is growing, and how pristine it is?

Modern films can give you some ideas of the local ecosystems.  For
example, in Dances with Wolves, there is only one scene lasting only a few
minutes, that shows a fairly pristine native grassland.

MAP PRISTINE RELIC STANDS that exist today?
In my 1997 Megatransect, I noted each pristine ecosystem that I ran
across, along the 2,200 miles I mapped.  You can see at the bottom of the
page at http://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect.html, for the Wells to
Jackpot Nevada map, that north of Wells there was a pristine prairie.

MEASURE the PRISTINE STANDS and make a record, and preserve it somewhere
for the future?.

Of course, once you locate the pristine relic stands, you need to measure
them, to get an idea of what percentage of cover, each species made of the
total ecosystem.  Perhaps there could be a web site like the
http://www.confluence.org project, where native pristine native understory
stands could be mapped for each state, and the data from the transect of
the species composition, taken at particular Lat. & Long. coordinates,
could be listed?

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333