Open Space subcommittee unveils draft GIS conservation-priority map, flags missing datasets

Michelle, the subcommittee intern who led the GIS work, presented a draft conservation-priority map to the Open Space Commission, saying the goal was “to give the commission and ultimately the city a datadriven spatially explicit picture of where conservation investment will have the greatest impact within Davis’s planning area.” She described a methodology that divides the planning area into 5‑acre hexagons, scores 13 attributes across eight categories (floodplains, creek proximity, conservation lands, farmland, sensitive‑species habitat and others), and sums results to show higher‑value hexagons on the map.