DATABASE UPDATE AND MANAGEMENT OF THE CALIFORNIA DESERT DISTRICT'S DESERT RENEWABLE ENERGY CONSERVATION PLAN DISTURBANCE INVENTORY

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) is an interagency landscape-level plan that streamlines renewable energy development while conserving unique and valuable desert ecosystems and providing outdoor recreation opportunities. The Bureau of Land Management signed the Record of Decision approving its Land Use Plan Amendment in 2016, covering 10 million acres of BLM-managed lands in the DRECP plan area. The DRECP requires the creation of a region-wide disturbance inventory for all Bureau of Land Management lands within the California Desert District (CDD) with the intention of laying the groundwork for a nationally comprehensive disturbance tracking tool, the Surface Disturbance and Reclamation Tracking Tool (SDARTT). At the time of research ,the DRECP Disturbance Inventory was not complete. Right of Way (ROW) data for buried lines within the California Desert District needed to be manually input, consolidated, and edited in order to complete the DRECP inventory. Database management and consolidation methods required: the use of versioning, creation of arcpy scripts to partially automate data reclassification, ROW data clipping, new attribute population, and the creation of relationship tables between overlapping ROW data. At the termination of research, over 90% of sensitive areas within the CDD boundary had been updated and reclassified in the main DRECP geodatabase. An official protocol was written to instruct following data scientists in the methods of ROW data management and reclassification. Completing the DRECP disturbance inventory is imperative to maintaining the integrity of sensitive environmental areas by ensuring that their federally mandated disturbance limits are not exceeded by any new renewable energy, or other, projects.