Vegetation Type Map survey · King City quadrangle

How a Forest Service crew walked the King City quadrangle

Autumn 1937 to winter 1938

Late Nov 1937 – Jan 1938 · Monterey County, California · 49 plots · three surveyors

Between late November 1937 and the second week of January 1938, three men from the California Forest and Range Experiment Station measured 49 vegetation plots in the hills southwest of San Ardo, on the sheet the survey called the King City quadrangle. V. Stackhouse worked the southeast corner first. C. A. Graham took over in mid-December, joined for four days by A. Simontacchi, and kept going through Christmas week into the new year. Each plot was a stake in the ground, a card filled out by hand, and often a plant cut for the herbarium. The cards were typed into a database in the 2000s; the plot locations were digitized off the crew's own red-stamped topo sheets; the plants went to Berkeley and Davis. This page puts those three records back on the same ground.

On the afternoon of 14 December, at plot C-3-35, Graham cut a wood fern that no one recorded in these hills again until 2 September 2026.

Survey plots on modern satellite imagery. Each circle is good to about a football field; the walking lines are a reconstructed guess, not a logged route. The green dot is the 2026 fern.

Press play, or drag along the timeline. Arrow keys step a day at a time. The height of each mark is how much the crew produced that day.

GrahamStackhouseSimontacchi2026 find 1929–30 plots from the first pass over this sheet

Plot cards

Sheets pressed

What the map is and isn't

The circles are where the digitization project placed each plot when it georeferenced the 1930s plot maps. The shapefile carries a positional error of 127 metres for every plot on this sheet, so read each circle as good to about a football field. The line drawn on a given day joins that person's plots in the shortest order that visits them all, started from the end nearer to wherever they had been the day before, and the moving dot walks it. That is a guess at sequence, not a track: nobody logged the route, and the plot numbers on the cards were assigned on the map rather than in the order walked. Where two people were out on the same day they get separate lines.

The sheets are herbarium specimens in the Consortium of California Herbaria whose collector, county, and date fall inside the campaign. Not every plot produced a sheet and not every sheet has a plot; a sheet on a day with no plots means the collector was out but the card for that stop was either not made or not digitized. Duplicate sheets of one gathering are collapsed to one line. Where the consortium has an image, a thumbnail is shown; the striped box means the sheet exists but has not been photographed. Each name links to its record.

Two dates were corrected. Plot C-3-37 is filed as 30 September, but the transcriber's own note says the card reads "Nov. 30", and Stackhouse was working that corner from 29 November to 3 December. Plot C-3-22 is filed as 28 December 1932; Graham was not surveying in 1932 and its neighbours are dated 29 December 1937. Both are shown on the corrected dates and flagged on their cards. Two of Graham's January sheets come from the Bradley sheet to the south, after the crew moved on; they are kept as the end of the story.

Sources: the Wieslander Vegetation Type Mapping plot data and plot shapefile (berkeley-gif/vtm-plotsdata on GitHub, a Kelly Lab project at UC Berkeley); the Consortium of California Herbaria, CCH2 portal, for the records of C. A. Graham, V. Stackhouse and A. Simontacchi in Monterey County; iNaturalist observation 396756520 for the 2026 find. Imagery is Esri World Imagery; the topographic layer is OpenTopoMap.