Type E Transfer — Reference Sites

ATTO and ERNA thresholds for 2003-plan revegetation parcels

Author

Inyo County Water Department

Published

September 3, 2025

Modified

July 25, 2026

Scope of this page

What: Reference-parcel analysis that supports ATTO / ERNA capping on Type E revegetation sites (LAW90/94/95 and LAW118/129 groups).

Why: Caps should be traceable to measured cover on comparable scrub—not invented cut points. This page documents which parcels, how means are built, and how they relate to ecological site / Green Book context. Working compliance lives on revegetation sites; shared direction vs open caps on goals & caps summary. Draft STM/NMDS pages remain prototypes.

Purpose

Reference surveys answer: what ATTO and ERNA cover is typical on nearby Type A (and related) scrub? Those means—and policy choices about how tightly to bind them—feed the capping rules used when scoring the 10% cover goal (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power 2003). Sample sizes by group and year are in Table 2.

Reference parcel map and ecological attributes

What: Fig. 1 maps reference parcels (filled) against Type E revegetation outlines; Table 1 lists Green Book type and community.

Why: Spatial context shows that reveg parcels are ABAG barren starts, while reference parcels are mostly intact scrub used for thresholds.1

Figure 1. Reference parcels for Type E capping (filled) and Laws revegetation parcels (outline).
Table 1. Reference parcels — Green Book type, community, and reference group (for LAW118/129 Plan ESD note see text above).

Data processing methodology

  1. Ingest. LAW90/94/95 reference rows from long-format CSVs; LAW118/129-group rows from Excel workbooks (transect labels normalized to lowercase, e.g. 3A3a).
  2. Cover. Reference values are treated as percent cover at the transect (hits already expressed as cover in source files).
  3. Summaries. Species contributions, ATTO/ERNA statistics, and cover histograms (Fig. 2) support policy thresholds used in the Laws compliance report. Zero-fill missing species before group averages so parcels with no ATTO/ERNA still enter the denominator.

Reference parcels summary

Table 2 summarizes transect counts by reference group and year.

Table 2. Reference parcel transect counts by group and year.

Methodology: Cover is calculated per transect first, then averaged across transects for each parcel-year-species combination.

Table 3. Species contribution to perennial cover in reference parcels by year (mean cover per transect, relative contribution, and transect counts). Default filter: ATTO and ERNA10.

ATTO/ERNA10 Summary Statistics

Table 4. ATTO and ERNA contribution to reference parcel perennial cover by species, group, and year.

The histograms below show cover distributions for parcels split by reference group. Each plot shows all years with 2025 shown in red.

Cover distributions by parcel are shown in Fig. 2.

Figure 2. Distribution of total transect cover by reference parcel and year. Panels are split by LAW90/94/95 and LAW118/129 groups; 2025 is highlighted.

Reference Data Downloads

The following datasets are available for download:

Download Instructions: - CSV buttons in the table below will download files directly - CSV links in the table will open in your browser - right-click and “Save As” to download - All files are updated with the latest corrected reference parcel analysis

Transects per Reference Parcel by Year

References

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. 2003. “Laws Revegetation Plan (Type E Transfer).” Los Angeles, California: LADWP.

Footnotes

  1. LAW090/094/095/118/129 are majority Gravelly Loam 5-8” P.Z. (R029XG009CA / R029XY087NV); Plan “gravely loam” language underpins the ATPO 3% cap—see STM and goals & caps. LAW069 is Type B rabbitbrush scrub. Composition space: NMDS.↩︎

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@report{county_water_department2025,
  author = {County Water Department, Inyo},
  publisher = {Inyo County Water Department},
  title = {Type {E} {Transfer} — {Reference} {Sites}},
  date = {2025-09-03},
  url = {https://github.com/inyo-gov/revegetation-projects},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
County Water Department, Inyo. 2025. “Type E Transfer — Reference Sites.” Data Report. Inyo County Water Department. https://github.com/inyo-gov/revegetation-projects.