Southern California T-sheets phase 2 completed

Phase 2 of the southern California t-sheets study has been completed. The report is now available, and the California T-sheets website - CalTsheets.org has been updated.

This project builds on earlier efforts to provide comprehensive analysis of the 40 T-sheets that cover the southern California Bight (SCB) from Point Conception to the US-Mexico border. High quality scans of the original T-sheets produced between 1851 and 1889 were obtained along with the surveyor notes. T-sheets were digitized, georeferenced, and interpreted in order to provide a map of coastal estuaries (both large and small) and coastal drainage systems representing conditions along the SCB coast in the mid-late 19th Century. This analysis was used to answer the following questions:

1. How much total estuarine habitat was there historically (i.e., as mapped on the T-sheets)
   compared to today?
2. How many total coastal systems occurred historically?
3. What has happened to historical estuarine habitat types?