| home | print page | email to a friend |

The City of Laguna Beach will use $171,300 approved by the Conservancy in March to add nearly 11.5 acres to Laguna Coast Wilderness Park. The Decker/Bossard property, in the Laguna Canyon Creek watershed, is almost pristine coastal sage scrub and chaparral, and contains numerous sandstone outcrops and caves. It lies on a steep slope adjacent to the Alta Laguna Regional Ridgeline Trail, a major accessway that links the coast to the 19,000-acre South Coast Wilderness system of parks and preserves. The Conservancy has helped to buy other nearby properties that were added to the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, which is managed by the County of Orange.

Mapping the Central Coast Seafloor

While small sections of offshore California have been mapped, most of the state's seafloor has yet to be charted. This year, researchers will begin the first phase of a project that is expected to eventually map California's entire seafloor in unprecedented detail. New technologies in acoustical and optical data gathering (see Coast & Ocean, Autumn 2005) make the project possible, and a $1.2-million grant from the Ocean Protection Council to the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Foundation is part of what makes it feasible.

The first phase of the project will focus on the Central Coast between Monterey and Bodega Bays, an area that includes three national marine sanctuaries: Gulf of the Farallones, Cordell Bank, and Monterey Bay. Among the project's goals are helping to identify fish habitats, navigational hazards, and geologic formations capable of producing tsunamis. Biologists and fishery managers are particularly interested in identifying rocky areas of the seafloor, which often support large populations of fish and other marine animals. In some areas, maps will be sufficiently detailed to reveal the precise composition of the seafloor.

More information is available at http://resources.ca.gov/copc. (Also, see see Coast & Ocean, Autumn 2005.)

Copyright 2006 © California Coastal Conservancy All Rights Reserved.