If your organization will be planting seeds and/or seedlings in the field, to keep track of your planting progress, your organization will need a Planting Site.
Users with the Admin role are able to create Planting Sites.
To create your Planting Site, start by navigating to the Planting Site menu item in the left hand navigation menu. From there you can click the button to create a planting site.
Terraware will then guide you through the rest of the process of drafting your planting site. For additional information about any steps in particular see the corresponding section below.
While you are creating a planting site, you will be able to save your progress using the Save and Close button in each step. This saves a draft of your planting site and allows you to resume setting it up. Only the creator of a planting site draft can edit it. Once a planting site is created, any user with the Admin role can edit it.
Simple or Detailed Site?
The first step of the planting site creation flow will ask if you want to create a simple or detailed site. Ultimately this comes down to whether your site is large and diverse enough to require stratification. A detailed site will be stratified and a simple site will be homogeneous.
Read more about Planting Site strata and substrata in the FAQs below.
Planting Site Details
Next you will be asked to fill in the details of your planting site, including giving it a name and description. You can optionally add planting seasons and assign a project to the site at this time as well. These fields can be edited after the site is created as well.
Planting Seasons are used to determine when the planting site is ready for Observations. For more information about Observations, visit Plant Monitoring through Observations.
Site Boundary
Now that your site has a name you can create the map, starting with the site boundary. Using the polygon drawing tool you will need to draw the boundary of your planting site. If you make a mistake you can use the undo and redo buttons to correct your work. And if you'd like to start over you can use the delete button to remove all previous work.
A site boundary needs to be comprised of one or more completed polygons. Don't worry about stratification yet, we will get to that in the next steps.
Exclusion Areas
Once you have a site boundary you will have the option of adding exclusion areas. Exclusion areas are areas within the site boundary that are not plantable. They will be excluded from our calculations of overall site area, plant density, and we will avoid those areas during site observations.
Typical reasons why you might have exclusion areas include:
- Buildings included within your site
- An access road running through your site
- Geographical reasons why planting an area is not feasible such as seasonal ponding or a large rock formation
Adding exclusion areas to your site is not required. Perhaps you were able to account for unplantable areas using your site boundary drawing. If so you can simply click the "Save and Next" button to continue onwards.
Drawing exclusion strata works the same as drawing your site boundary. Any area included in an exclusion area polygon will be excluded from the rest of your site calculations.
Stratum Boundaries
Now it's time to stratify your site. Using the slicing tool you can divide your existing site into strata. The slicing tool will allow you to carve out the part of your site that you want to be contained in a single stratum. For additional strata, just follow the same steps you used the first time.
Each stratum that you create will automatically be named and given a default target planting density. You can edit both the name and the target planting density of every stratum by clicking on it after you've created it. Simply edit the fields you want in the pop-up and save.
Reminder -- strata are optional and should be created only if your site needs to be stratified. If you opt not to create any substrata, Terraware will create one stratum that comprises your entire site.
Substrata Boundaries
Finally it is time for optionally dividing your strata into substrata. This is done on a stratum by stratum basis. First, select the stratum you want to divide into multiple substrata. Then, use the slicing tool as you did previously when creating strata. Once you are satisfied with the substrata of that stratum, you can select another stratum and repeat the process.
As with strata, each substratum will be automatically given a name that is editable by clicking on the stratum after it is created.
Reminder -- substrata are optional and should be used to help you divide the site into manageable planting areas. If you opt not to create any substrata for a stratum, Terraware will create one substratum that comprises that entire stratum.
FAQs
What is a stratum?
In general terms, stratification is the process by which a habitat can be divided into areas that display similar characteristics (homogeneity). More specifically, for large scale forestry projects, a planting site may be divided into multiple strata based on a number of attributes that will determine the plant growth patterns each area will support.
Within Terraware, Planting Sites have strata, where a stratum is an area of a planting site where the growing habitat will be relatively consistent throughout.
How many strata should my planting site have?
Most projects within Terraware will only contain a single stratum. That is, the entirety of the planting site will be a similar enough habitat that it can all be grouped together into a single homogeneous area. However, some very large projects may need multiple strata in order to properly plan restoration activities according to differences in growing conditions.
Some factors that might mean your site should be divided into multiple strata:
- Elevation will vary greatly within your planting site
- The distribution of species will vary greatly from one area of your site to another
- Meteorological conditions (rainfall, hours of sunlight, average temperature, etc) will vary greatly within your planting site
- Soil conditions vary greatly from one area of your site to another
- Target planting density will be different from one area of your site to another
As you can imagine, these conditions are related to one another. For example, if your site has a large spread of elevation, you will likely be planting different species at different elevations due to the differences in meteorological and soil conditions. In this case, it would make sense for your site to have one stratum for the higher elevation area and one stratum for the lower elevation area where habitats are more consistent.
Terraware does not require that strata are geographically contiguous.
Almost all projects will contain 3 or fewer strata. If you think your planting site requires 4 or more strata, it is likely that your site is either very large (10K+ hectares) or you are over-stratifying.
What are substrata?
Terraware uses substrata to break up larger strata into smaller sections. There are no rules about how large a substrata can be or how many make up a stratum. To make the best use out of Terraware's plant monitoring feature, each substrata should be sized such that it can be fully planted within a single planting season at your site, though this is not strictly required.
Many strata may be comprised of a single substratum. Others may have many substratum. Both are acceptable.