---
title: "The California Field Atlas"
chunk: 2/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_California_Field_Atlas"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T08:37:51.144541+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Artwork ===
Kaufmann's renderings of animals are mostly realistic but incorporate expressionistic flourishes—particularly in his choices of color palette—and thus do not adhere to the more literalistic standards of accuracy that would be expected from a conventional field guide. His wildlife paintings are meant to capture "the spirit of the subject" above all, and he acknowledged that his approach sometimes resulted in conspicuous differences between his art and an animal's literal appearance. As an example, he has often noted that the book includes a painting of a purple coyote, even though the animal is not actually purple in the wild. However, he explained that "coyotes aren't purple unless you're looking at them in the high desert sagebrush at sunset," and the subjective impression of the animal's appearance that can occur in that rare setting is what he sought to capture in his painting.

The book's maps include surveys of a wide variety of subjects, like the habitats of wild pigs, the state's various fir trees, areas prone to wildfire, wildflowers gardens, and many others. Each map is indexed with a unique four-digit number. Kaufmann said much of the book is "data-driven", in that the maps and their data are sourced from scientific governmental agencies including the California Department of Water Resources, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States Department of Energy (USDOE) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
Although the source maps were freely available online, they were often buried in remote corners of government websites and hard to access. These maps were often low-resolution and in his words "sterile", i.e. used for a single purpose and thus devoid of any richer meaningfulness or context. Kaufmann "reverse-engineered" his maps from these various online sources to make the information more accessible and educationally useful, calling his final product a "reference book for the 21st century".

Conveyance of proper scale was his foremost challenge in preparing the maps. Kaufmann noted that most modern readers are acclimated to online maps like Google Maps that allow users to easily zoom in and out, which is impossible to achieve with paint on paper. In order to present an "easily digested, unified vision" with a homogeneous sense of scale, Kaufmann used one simplified legend across all maps. For convenience and uniformity, the legend's symbols flatten some of the differences between certain features. For example, an identical icon is used to describe both a 10-square-mile (26 km2) campground on one map and the much larger Fort Irwin National Training Center—with a total area of about 1,000 square miles (2,600 km2)–on a second, larger map.
Given his medium of watercolor, Kaufmann acknowledged the possible presence of errors in declination and small mistakes like inadvertent smudges. Nonetheless, he wrote in the introduction that he believed any imprecisions in the work would fall within a reasonable margin of error, while reminding the reader that the maps were intended first and foremost as "expressive" works and that some of them had been prepared outdoors in uncontrolled conditions.

== Genre and themes ==

Kaufmann has said the Field Atlas is not a field guide and, while it is a book of maps, both the author and several commentators have suggested it is not an atlas in the conventional sense. Instead, Kaufmann employed the term "field atlas" to incorporate elements of systems thinking he saw as missing from contemporary nature writing. He explained:

"Unlike a field guide, which is really all about the what of [things]—like 'what is this stone, what is this butterfly'—or a regular atlas, which is very much all about the where of things, this book is concerned with the how of things. How are things put together? How do these big, living systems of the natural world coalesce and conspire to make this terrestrial paradise of California?"