A Geospatial Exotic Plant Database for Saguaro National Park

Christopherson, Gary

This project was designed to create a new spatial database for exotic plant species in Saguaro National Park. Cooperators were Dana Backer, Saguaro National Park (SNP), and Gary L. Christopherson, Director of the Center for Applied Spatial Analysis (CASA) at The University of Arizona. Michael T. Malone working through CASA was responsible for the hands-on development of the database and the migration of legacy data into the new system. He also created a series of macros that automate much of the processing necessary for management of the data and for producing information for reports. In addition, Michael wrote the manual for using the database. Essential feedback and suggested improvements for this project were supplied by – Becky MacEwen, Bethany Hontz, Adam Springer, and Matt Daniels of the National Park Service. This report comes in two parts: first, an executive summary of the project containing a list of deliverables, a discussion of previous databases, a description of the new database; and second, the manual developed for the project which will provide a detailed description of the database, field collection, data management and reporting functions. Funding was provided through a grant from the Desert Southwest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit.