Owner/Client
City of St. Peters
Location
St. Peters, MO
CEC Services
- GIS Analysis
- Vegetative Habitat Assessment
- Wetland and Stream Functional Assessment
- Natural Resources Management Planning
Owner Objective
The City of St. Peters was looking to develop a Natural Resources Management Plan (NRMP) to supplement its existing Stormwater Management Plan and provide the City with guidance on managing and protecting natural resource assets. The NRMP will create an achievable set of actionable recommendations by bringing together elements from desktop and field-collected data, ecosystem management principles, existing plans and policies, and best management practices. To accomplish this, the City is using a phased approach to develop the NRMP, with each phase being broken into a series of tasks.
CEC Approach
CEC is nearing completion of Phase 1 of this project, which included a review and cleanup of the City’s existing stewardship area shapefiles. In doing so, CEC created an ArcGIS geodatabase comprised of new feature classes, feature datasets, and topologies for the new NRMP geodatabase. CEC performed desktop inventories and classifications of the City’s natural areas by conducting land cover and Missouri Ecological Classification System (MECS) mapping in order to establish a baseline data inventory for making decisions and recommendations within its NRMP. Land cover mapping included delineating and digitizing vegetative habitats and water resources throughout the City’s 2,240 acres of natural areas. To perform MECS mapping, CEC used the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Soil Data Viewer 6.2 ArcGIS tool. Because it was important to provide both GIS and non-GIS users the ability to view and query this data, CEC provided the City an ArcGIS online mapping application at no extra cost (see figure below).
CEC is currently preparing for Phase 2 of the project, which will include assessing habitat types identified under Phase 1 (stream, wetland, upland, and open water), comparing present conditions to historic natural communities, assigning quality ranking to resources, and identifying resource problems and concerns. The final output from Phase 2 would be a scoring matrix to provide a comparative analysis amongst habitat types based on their benchmark conditions. This matrix will provide the basis for developing management goals, actions, and schedules under Phase 3, which will consist of developing goals and management strategies, as well as the formal NRMP document.
