Forests are the primary habitats for native wildlife in Orange County.
The result is a GIS database in ArcInfo for the Orange County Planning Office and all interested citizens. This project developed a simple procedure in ArcInfo for rating each tract of land in Orange County according to its value for native wildlife. Each tract also receives a Contextual Rating based on the average Intrinsic Rating for all land within three concentric buffers which are weighted inversely according to their distances from the tract. These ratings are intended to provide an index of the importance of tracts of land for native wildlife in general. They thus can provide a way to evaluate the expected consequences of changes in land use.