California Rivers Assessment Final Report to the Wildlife Conservation Board, California Riparian Habitat Inventory and Assessment

In 1992 representatives of 28 agencies gathered at the request of California Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler. These agencies recognized that diverse programs, goals, missions, regulations, and geographic regions required diverse information to support decisions regarding the management and conservation of California's rivers. They recommended a process that began with a survey of professional judgement of California's river conditions, and continued with the accumulation, organization, and internet publication of a large and diverse body of facts and tools dedicated to the analysis and management of California's rivers. CARA, the California Rivers Assessment, contains 39 sets of mapped geographical information system (GIS) layers, 60 sets of tabular (database) and textual (text) data, as well as links (internet connections) to 510 additional maps, tables and texts located on other servers. All of this data is organized by watershed and theme. CARA makes the data available to interested parties over the internet for a wide variety of analytical and management purposes.

This final report describes the materials gathered, analyzed, compiled, organized, and made available by the CARA project.