Type an address.
Get the base plan and native plant palette.

No — the Lekua base plan is planning-level (mapping-grade, roughly BIMForum LOD 200), built from county parcel GIS and USGS lidar, and the sheet says so: General Note 1 reads NOT A SURVEY, and the sources-and-tolerances note prints county parcel lines ±5 to 15 ft, structures ±5 to 10 ft where a county or city mapped them, and USGS 3DEP elevations ±1 ft on open ground under 30% slope and ±2 ft on steeper ground or under tree canopy (NAVD 88). A remote-sensed national building outline has an unverified shape and a measured offset from its roof: FEMA’s imagery-traced outlines typically about 11 ft off, up to about 17 ft, and Microsoft’s machine-learned ones typically about 3 ft, up to about 7 ft (measured against lidar roofs, El Dorado County 2026); Overture’s mixed outlines are not measured, and one larger than its lot is flagged with no tolerance given. It is for pre-design and concept work: your surveyor still shoots the topo and stakes the build, and boundary determinations belong to a licensed land surveyor.

Type the address into Lekua at lekua.design. It returns a layered DXF base plan for that parcel — county parcel lines, 1–2 ft contours on most lots, building outlines, tree canopy, spot elevations, slope bands, and defensible-space zones — drawn in the county’s California State Plane zone for AutoCAD and Vectorworks, with a local-grid copy for SketchUp Pro, plus a PDF site report. It works in all 58 California counties. Analyzing a site is free; downloading the files needs a free account. It is planning-level, not a survey.

Lekua exports a layered DXF base plan (DXF 2000), drawn in the county’s California State Plane zone in US survey feet for AutoCAD and Vectorworks, with a local-grid copy of the same sheet for SketchUp Pro — plus a PDF site report. Layers are named to the U.S. National CAD Standard: county parcel lines, 1–2 ft contours on most lots, spot elevations, slope bands, roof outlines with roof elevations labeled by source, tree canopy, and defensible-space zones. The seasonal sun study is in the PDF.

Yes — Lekua places your surveyor’s boundary on the base plan. With a free account, drop the survey in as a DXF, DWG or vector PDF (plotted from CAD, not a scan). Lekua reads the title block and boundary, places it by a best fit to the county parcel without stretching it — lengths, angles and area stay the surveyor’s — and recomputes lot area, setbacks and coverage. From a DXF or DWG it also carries the survey’s trees, walls, easements and utilities, marked PER SURVEY. If the survey doesn’t line up with the county parcel well enough to be sure it is this lot, Lekua doesn’t use it and says why. Lekua’s placement is not the survey; the survey governs.

Lekua covers all 58 California counties. Contours are traced on demand from the USGS 3DEP 1-meter elevation model — 1–2 ft on most lots, coarser on very large or steep parcels or where USGS lists no 1 m lidar — and in Marin the county’s own 2019 2 ft lidar contours are drawn. The sheet states the source and the interval drawn.

Lekua matches California natives to the parcel’s soil (USDA SSURGO), modeled sun, rainfall, and elevation, ranks them against the parcel’s reference plant community, and arranges them in five planting layers from canopy to ground plane. Plants are grouped by shared light and water, each tagged with the defensible-space zones it suits and its WUCOLS water rating for the region (a marked estimate where WUCOLS has no entry), with the site’s MWELO water allowance alongside.

Lekua answers that per parcel: the natives that fit that site’s conditions, not a statewide list. It builds a native plant palette for any California address: California natives screened against the parcel’s soil pH and drainage (USDA SSURGO), its modeled sun, annual rainfall, and elevation, ranked against the plant community that belongs there, and arranged from canopy to ground plane — each with the defensible-space zones it suits and its WUCOLS water rating for the region (a marked estimate where WUCOLS has no entry). Calscape, from the California Native Plant Society, is the statewide reference it is built from.

Lekua sends the address to Mapbox to find the parcel; in some counties it also sends the house number and street name to the county’s public addressing service, to confirm it drew the right lot. The analysis then reads public data sources (county GIS, USGS, USDA, CAL FIRE, and similar) using the parcel’s coordinates, and an aerial image of the parcel goes to Anthropic to detect trees, lawn, and hardscape. Lekua also records each search in its own database — the address and its coordinates, city and county, whether a parcel was found, and your account or an anonymous session id — to improve Lekua: finding parcels it drew wrong, analyses that failed, and places it does not cover; to name the county, the coordinates are sent to the U.S. Census Bureau’s public county lookup. That record is never sold, never sent to an analytics provider, and not shared beyond that; product analytics see county and city only. When a lot cannot be confirmed, the address can also appear in Lekua’s server logs at its host, Vercel. Deleting a project removes its saved address and files, but not the search log; deleting your account removes your account from it. The full policy is at lekua.design/privacy.

Lekua is free to use for analyzing a site, with no account needed. Downloading the .dxf or the PDF needs a free account — sign in with Google or an email link. There is no paid plan today.