Appendix 6
Reference Document 6-2
text field, it will throw an error for those fields that do not start with a number, which will allow us to only keep the rows that have the desired dates. From the new field,
retain records with a year of 2000 or more recent. • Dissolve by both scientific name and "EO_ID".
• Since we are dissolving on both, we need to check to see if there are duplicates. It is hard to evaluate if we have any double species due to name changes, so do a second dissolve just on the "EO_ID". Compare the two different dissolve outputs. They have the same number of records, which confirms that keeping the species names isn’t causing double counting (which could happen if the name had changed and both versions were used in the dataset). Assign the animal data to the cores • Use a spatial join to join the dissolved animal source feature class created above to the intact habitat cores. A one-to-many join makes a copy of each core polygon for each unique species, which lets us see which species has been observed in each core. This provides helpful reference data, but this information is sensitive and cannot be shared publicly. • Use another spatial join to join the dissolved animal feature class created above to the intact habitat cores. A one-to-one join just makes one row for each core, and has a join_count field that counts number of unique species. So, in the resulting layer, the join_count field has the number of unique animals that meet our criteria. • Make a copy of the animal join_count field. Since we will ultimately add the plant and animal counts together, we need to retain each separately with meaningful field names. Combine the plant and animal core species counts to calculate total species richness • Use a union to combine all the plant and animal features into one dataset. • Add and calculate a field that sums the values from the plant join_count and animal join_count field. Outputs Publicly sharable layers NC_cores_ranked_by_heritage_species_totals This layer counts the total number of unique species observed in each core. Because it does not contain the names of each species that intersect the core, it is not as sensitive.
Page 8
2025 NC Wildlife Action Plan
Made with FlippingBook Ebook Creator