Foundational Site Assessment
What Is A Foundational Site Assessment?
A Foundational Site Assessment is a thorough cataloging of the site-specific factors unique to your property that should inform your homestead design, construction and management decisions. To create a sovereign homestead you have to know the essential nature of the land, climate and ecosystem that you’re working with – that’s what the FSA is for.
*Performing an FSA is a prerequisite for developing a Mainframe Design.
Why Perform A Foundational Site Assessment?
- Simplify your design process – narrow the array of possibilities to only those that are a fit for your landscape, climate and bio-region.
- Maximize the returns on your time – focus on what is appropriate for your context and ignore the rest!
- Discover and leverage your ‘unfair advantages’ – every landscape has one, so make sure you know what yours is and how to align your design, construction and management decisions with it!
- Have a place for everything and everything in it’s place – organize this essential information so that it is easy and quick to reference as decisions need to be made.
What’s Included?
- 1-day on-site survey
- Base map of existing conditions with custom LiDAR contours and other layers as detailed in the Custom Contour Base Map service.
- Digital FSA Report containing the following:
- Topography data (derived from drone imagery)
- Temperature data (averages and record extremes, chill hours, climate zones, growing season).
- Environmental Sectors
- Water (annual and historic extremes, distribution, and intensity of precipitation, humidity profile, groundwater, climate brittleness, relevant on and off-property catchment calculations).
- Solar (annual sun angles, day length range, annual sunny days, solar insolation).
- Wind (diurnal and seasonal directions and intensities).
- Soil & Vegetation (soil parent material data, infiltration rates, soil health assessment, catalog of existing vegetation and inferences for soil health, function and mineral availability).
- Zones Maps (present patterns of use).
- Existing Legal Constraints & Utilities
- Legal zoning
- Utilities: gas, water, power, septic/sewer, communications, easements to whatever degree they have been documented.
- Ownership & Land Use History
- Assessment of Existing Conditions for whole-site water, access, structures and living systems patterning.
- Prioritized Recommendations for optimizing water, access, structures and living systems to meet your specific Quality of Life needs.
- Virtual presentation of report of findings.
- Access to all original data files.
Who Is It For?
If you are new on your property and want to know what it can do, or are just beginning to design and create your homestead, or are re-designing your landscape with an eye to future resilience, a Foundational Site Assessment is the place to start.
What Is The Investment?
Price Range: $2,000 – $4,500* + travel/lodging/incidentals
- Cost of performing the Foundational Site Assessment will be deducted from the overall cost of a Mainframe Homestead Design should you choose to engage this option in the future.
Time to completion: Generally 3-4 weeks after the site visit.
*Exact price will be quoted based on property size, topography and distance to be traveled.
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