The California Resources Agency has compiled all city and county general plan maps and put them on the Web. The myriad local land use categories have been standardized into 13 land use types, which allows one to view patterns at the county, region, and state levels. Go to: http://legacy.ca.gov/new_atlas.epl to open the site. Then, click on Land Ownership and Use. Select General Plans. This layer is the plans as received and standarized. You have to zoom onto a part of the state, for the map to draw. You can zoom in and out and query features. Then, click on General Plans Rural Residential. In this version, the UC Davis researchers who prepared the datasets used Census population data to calculate residential densities in the rural areas, designated Agriculture or Open Space in county general plans. This map shows large areas in Low Density Residential and also in Very Low Density Residential. Click on the green Info buttons and then on the Supplemental Information links to get the written statements of how these two maps were created. You can also follow other links to download these two maps. These maps were created to give Federal, State, and local planners and private organizations the ability to plan for habitat protection, wildfire prevention, and agricultural preservation at the regional and statewide levels. Readers will be surprised to see that many counties have large areas in residential land uses, even on prime agricultural lands and in very high wildfire hazard areas. Direct questions to Professor Bob Johnston at 530 582-0700. Some city data were not available and so they were designated Urban Reserve.
