The NPS Vegetation Inventory Program goals are, among others, to consistently map and document the vegetation of all National Park Service units with a resource component, thereby creating a baseline vegetation inventory. Based on these decisions the final vegetation inventory project boundary covered 330-hectares (814-acres) consisting of the MANZ boundary as it existed in 2005. All plant community data that could be interpreted from the 2010 NAIP Ortho Photography for Inyo County, California - Manzanar Quadrangle were digitized in accordance with the minimum mapping unit (MMU) of 1/2 hectare. This included selected features that fell into the National Vegetation Classification and the Anderson Level II land use classification. Some classes below the MMU were included, especially water and wetland features, weed patches, and those at the edge of the study area (i.e. cut off by other features and borders). Managed roads (to visible right-of-way or fence line) and streams/drainages wider than 10 meters were digitized as polygons and attributed accordingly. Polygons were checked in the field and attributed accordingly. The final MANZ spatial database and map layer was produced by CTI from 2010 imagery using 21 map units that were directly cross-walked or matched to their corresponding rUSNVC plant association/alliance or land cover types (FGDC 2008). Maps and other spatial data products for parks in the Continental United States are normally produced in Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection, North America 1983 (NAD 83) datum, use meters for map and distance units, and have a nominal 1:24,000-scale with a minimum mapping unit (MMU) of 0.5 hectare (1.2 acres). The vegetation maps must meet the National Map Accuracy Standards for positional accuracy (TNC and ESRI 1994a & Lea and Curtis 2010), and the recently revised minimum map class accuracy goal across all vegetation and land cover classes of 60% percent at the finest scale (formerly 80%, NPS 2009).The final map layer was assessed for thematic accuracy by creating contingency tables and the final overall accuracy of the map layer was determined to be 96% with a Kappa value of 95%.

More information can be found in the project report, which is bundled with the vegetation map published for BIOS here: https://filelib.wildlife.ca.gov/Public/BDB/GIS/BIOS/Public_Datasets/3100_3199/ds3129.zip