Waimea Nature Park, "Ulu La‘au"

• A new 10-acre park in Waimea (Kamuela) on the Big Island
• The name, Ulu La‘au, means "garden of trees".  Ulu La‘au was documented in 1830 by the Rev. Lorenzo Lyons, founder of Waimea's 'Imiola Congregational Church, as the Hawaiian designation for the area. More recently the land was used for farming or pastureland.
• The park is a project of the Waimea Outdoor Circle (WOC), a branch of the Hawai'i group The Outdoor Circle.  The WOC was formed in 1989; the park began in 1999, with real work commencing August 2000.  The WOC has an office in the 'old Lindsey building'.
• The park could really benefit from some modelling and visualization to bring attention and help with planning
• The park doesn't have a website itself, but there is a very preliminary Waimea Outdoor Circle site.
• Various Big Island sites mention the park in regards to volunteering to work on the park; googling on "Waimea Nature Park" returns a good number of hits.

Organization

• The park project is handled by WOC, and apparently the park is also a 501(c)3 non-profit organization
• Everyone is a volunteer - it's a community effort!

Some of the People Involved

• Richard Waller, rwaller@aloha.net (775-0601) is the master planner for the park
• Waimea Outdoor Circle (WOC) office (885-5210), email is WOC@aloha.net
• Victor Obrastoff, writestuff04@hawaii.rr.com (887-0500) is current WOC President
• Stephanie Donoho, stephanie@donoho-llc.com was the WOC Volunteer Coordinator until May 2005
• Arlene Block, arleneblock@prodigy.net, (885-4753) is former WOC President and very active with the park
• Ken Block, kenblock@prodigy.net is described by Stephanie as 'resident guru'
• Pete Hendricks, oldsaltp@yahoo.com (885-4453) is a guy very experienced on lots of park issues including the fish in the stream
• Carol Hendricks, carolhe@hawaii.rr.com used to coordinate the volunteers, and is very active with the park. She is interfacing with some folks doing a survey of the park.
• USDA NRCS people
  • Reese Libby, rlibby@hi.nrcs.usda.gov, NRCS Waimea (885-6602x107), has GIS, GPS and other digital survey data for the park.  He also has a copy of the NRCS Emerge aerial image.
  • Carolyn Wong is a NRCS soil conservationist who is assisting on the conservation plan
  • Matthew Wung is the District Conservationist for the Waimea field office
  • The office is located in the "Kamuela Business Center" building - right across the street from HPM and the Shell gas station.
• Clem Lam, architect and artist, c.lam4@verizon.net (885-4431), chairman of Waimea Trails and Greenways, has an office right next to the park in Carter Prof. Center
• Bob Hunter, engineer, bob@webpatent.com (885-4144, or 885-4194) is a guy who has helped out by starting the WOC website; his wife Mary, mary@yestech.com is also active in WOC
• Jackie (sp?) comes in to staff the WOC office a couple afternoons a week.
• Kathryn Wiese of Retrospective Design, retrodesign@earthlink.net, made a lovely little 4-minute video with pictures of the park set to music
• Donna Gardner - volunteer, treasurer for the WOC and the park
• a couple nice folks within the Hart Howarton architecture company are talking about helping out with producing an educational building in the park - current idea is probably a long thin building
• Kadie Harris, kadie@interpac.net (885-4872) assembles the WOC newsletter on Mac PageMaker and gets it printed at Mike's Printing
• Deighton Emmons, teacher at HPA.  As of September 2007, Pete Hendricks has been in contact with Deighton who has done extensive GPS and GIS work on his campus. He and Pete are in discussions to do GPS mapping of all the plants in the Park.

Data

• USGS DRG doesn't show much; it was last updated in 1982.  It does have the stream in the approximately correct place, but doesn't have much else:
   
• USGS DLG (revised early 90s) is a little better.  It shows approximate extent of the vegetation (the weed trees before the park clearing began) and more accurate data for the surrounding roads and buildings:
  
• Aerial photos
  • at first i couldn't locate any recent aerials, only a grainy old 1977 aerial which shows the current park area as the only part of Waimea that had any significant tree coverage back then:
    
  • USDA Emerge aerial: after failing to get a copy on DVD from the State NRCS, i got a copy of the Emerge aerial from Reese at the local NRCS (8.4 MB MrSID file)
  • Here's an JPG extract of it in the park area (click for full image):
    
  • Two structures are visible, probably the greenhouse and the tool container-shed.
  • Running the Emerge image through PixelSenseCIR produced a fairly decent true color image, with only a few purplish areas on the buildings and bare earth.  I used PhotoShop to patch those small areas:
    
    The image for all of Waimea is big (a 177MB TIF) so here it is as a 7 MB zip containing a JPEG with a JGW (JPEG World File).  If your software needs to know what projection it is, it's NAD83 UTM zone 5.  A thumbnail of the full Waimea image:
    
• GPS Waypoints
  • data received from Reese Libby which resulted from a GPS data-gathering trip with local students
  • allwaypoint.shp (79 points) scattered over the dry side, and a cluster in the park
  • buildings.shp (2 polygons) approximate outline of greenhouse and tool container-shed
  • officewaypts.shp (24 points) mostly up in North Kohala..
  • schoolwaypoint.shp (182 points) scattered over the dry side, and a cluster in the park
  • waypoint101503.shp (39 points) all inside the park
• Some possibly usable control points for the area
  • these were estimated from DLG and Emerge aerial which align within 1-2 meters (in UTM zone 5)
  • main intersection of town: 220780, 2215968
  • intersection of highway and CFH entry road: 220503, 2215757
  • intersection of highway and Opelo Road: 219983, 2216217
• 04.12.03, i cropped and rectified a TMK map (h66003) using those three control points.
  • Using the result, i digitized the boundaries of the park:
    
  • Resulting park boundary as SHP file: park_poly_v2.zip
  • Here is the full-resolution Emerge with the new boundary polygon overlaid:
    
• Elevation data
  • the USGS data is not useful, as the contours are 40ft, which shows the park area as basically flat, which it certainly isn't.
  • Contours1: Some contours of the park were surveyed; received a JPG scanned image of them.  However, it was scanned at too low a resolution to read the elevation values, so now the search is for the original contour survey document, which is probably on blueprint paper somewhere:
    (920x621 jpg)
  • Contours2: Received a scan from Richard on 12/14 which is 2.4x higher resolution:
    (2656x1916 jpg)
    The contours are now legible, e.g. "2640", "2650", with 2-foot contours between them: "42", "44", "46", "48".  The only area that's still hard to read is along the stream.
  • Richard reports that the original contour survey is dated 1979.  It exists on a 2x3' blueprint.  He reduced it to 11x17", then again to 8.5x11" and scanned the result at 250 or 300 dpi, which produced the contour bitmap above.
  • A better survey is underway.  As of July 2005, they have reportedly finished the elevation contours and are now working on the boundaries.
• Open questions:
  • is there data for the irrigation system?
  • is there any chart of where and what plants are now planted?

Boundaries and surrounding parcels

• The County website now has TMK maps online, so it's possible to download the maps around the park.  The parcels just to the north and east of the park are in h65003.tif; the park itself and some adjacent parcels are in h66003.tif;  southwest of the park is a subdivision in h66008.tif
• Interestingly, 65003 shows the stream path much more detailed than 66003 which contains the park:
• 
• Unfortunately these TMK maps are not to scale, not in any known projection, and not geolocated - which makes them pretty useless for visualization

Future Plans

• A Picture of Ideas for The Waimea Nature Park (Richard Waller, 1999):
  

The Stream

• Waikoloa Stream flows through the park.  This stream starts in the watershed above the town and flows a long distance west through the desert to the ocean, on the coast between Spencer Beach Park and the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel.
• The endemic (and threatened) Hawaiian stream fish Lentipes concolor (a kind of goby, ‘O‘opu hi‘ukole or ‘o‘opu alamo‘o) is found in the stream, although it has not been found in the park itself.  It is amphidromous (can also live in the ocean) and is found higher up in the stream, as well as in other streams on other Hawaiian islands.  This means it must migrate through the park section of the stream.
• There is a list of Hawai'i streams in the NPS Rivers, Trails & Conservation Program, but Waikoloa Stream isn't mentioned.
• Stream Survey of Waikoloa and Keanu‘i‘omanō Streams (2002) has more detail about the stream flow and animal life.
• The State DLNR DAR has a great site about Hawaiian Streams including the animals!
• More pictures of the goby.  The female is olive to brownish all over, while the male is brownish on the head and pale yellow to bright red on the tail.
• The stream can flood big!  On Sunday, March 14, 2004, Baron Sekiya wrote in his blog: "It was constant rain in North Hawaii today with a downpour coming at about 10am which caused the Waikoloa Stream to overflow. The stream flooded businesses, homes, streets and Waimea Nature Park. The park, as seen in the above photo had the overflowing stream coursing through a grassy area and turned it into a river, it rolled back the grassy lawn like a carpet."
• This means that a fairly large part of the part is essentially a flood-plain of the stream, which has some pretty big implications for park planning.  Traditional concrete canalization of the stream is a controversial option; it has many drawbacks in terms of natural and visual impact, and it could just make the flood damage worse downstream.  Another option is to reduce the degree of flooding with catchment upstream, which is surely a complex issue, as there are already several catchment systems above town, which are clearly not controlling flooding.

Trails

• From the County website as of 2002:
  • "Waimea Trails and Greenways (County cooperating with the Community): The first portion of the Waimea Trail and Greenways project, directly to the left and right just inside the entrance to the Waimea Nature Park, is now open to the public. Though this first open stretch is less than a mile, it now connects with a network of trails inside the Nature Park, and will eventually be ten or more miles in length. The Trail will create a green corridor through the heart of Waimea along the Waikoloa Stream and will provide an accessible connecting pathway between residences, businesses & schools."
  • "The proposed Waimea Trails and Greenways will begin at a trail head at a vacant County of Hawai‘i park opposite the South Kohala View Estates residential subdivision on the west side of Waimea Town and proceed to Church Row in Waimea Town on the east. The approximately 4.5 miles long trail generally follows the meandering course of Waikoloa Stream through urban and agricultural lands."
• November 23, 2004 - West Hawaii Today reports: "The Waimea Trails and Greenways project got a boost Friday with several key approvals. The state Board of Land and Natural Resources approved a transfer of a lease of state land for the project. Parts of the 17.6-acre parcel will be used for parking and access to the trail project. Board members meeting in Honolulu also granted the county several easements to allow construction of the trail across portions of state land."
• Waimea Trails and Greenways (WTG) has a site at http://waimeatrails.org/
• There is also a paragraph about WTG on http://www.waimeaplan.org/resources/waimea/ along with a very rough Schematic map
• Consultant in Kona, Kaz Shigezawa does survey and drafting for the WTG trail, including the part that goes through the park.

Press Coverage

• November 22, 2002, Honolulu Advertiser, Big Island group aims to cultivate nature park
  • a 'draft park management plan is available' - who has it?  Article says "available for public review and comment by contacting Carolyn Stewart via e-mail at mcsintl@flex.com"
• West Hawaii Today has covered the park occasionally, but their archives don't seem to be online

Organizational Coverage

• The park is mentioned in the FWS (Fish and Wildlife Service) site in Hawai`i Biodiversity Joint Venture FY 2003 Funded Projects (pdf): "The Waimea Nature Park is a 10 acre parcel of State land leased by Waimea Outdoor Circle (WOC) for environmental research, education and restoration. WOC is developing the moist-mesic area along the Waikoloa stream to support native aquatic and terrestrial species. WOC will remove invasive/noxious plant species, install a temporary fence and irrigation system to support endangered and threatened plant species, and monitor results. WOC will also provide long-term maintenance of these plants, keep a written and photographic record, and provide an opportunity for environmental education for local school groups and the general public."
• The Manoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (CTAHR) mentions the park in their 2002 report: "Hundreds of hours of volunteer labor, including those of 4-H members and leaders, transformed Waimea Nature Park from a weedy jungle of alien vines to a garden of native plants for the community to enjoy."

The Town of Waimea

• Nino Walker's Planning Thesis Data Page has maps and stuff for the region in which the park is situated