CBI is producing a spatial decision support system (SDSS) for the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District (“District”). The District works to conserve habitat, watersheds, and agriculture for people and wildlife in Sonoma County, CA, and is pursuing the development of an SDSS to help guide its land conservation strategies. First, the SDSS will support the development of a ten-year, comprehensive county-wide conservation plan through analysis of multiple conservation themes. It will also assist parcel-scale decisions relating to individual conservation easement projects. In addition, it will produce county-wide outputs (e.g., high priority habitat areas) that can be integrated with other open space planning and scenario-building processes (e.g., the County General Plan). Finally, the SDSS framework—its hierarchical data integration architecture—and supporting data will be published online as an interactive, Web-based program so that the public can explore and learn about the District’s prioritization methods and priority conservation areas.
On the technical end, the Sonoma County SDSS will use an expansion of CBI’s Environmental Evaluation Modeling System (EEMS) along with a new habitat representation algorithm and an expansion of the Linkage Mapper connectivity model (from circuitscape.org). Please contact John Gallo with any questions or comments.
The San Joaquin Valley Data Basin Gateway was created to support a multi-stakeholder effort to identify least conflict lands for utility scale solar development in the San Joaquin Valley in Central California. Stakeholders represented include the solar industry, farming community, ranching community, and environmental community. Each stakeholder group addressed the least conflict question from their perspectives and generated map-based results. After compiling the results, around 470,000 acres of land was identified as potentially desirable to solar developers and least conflict from the standpoint of the other groups. Phase I is complete with a final report due out in February 2016, but the Gateway persists with an extremely valuable data library (~600 datasets pertinent to the region) and other content, and stakeholders have expressed interest in continuing to use the system to continue refining the work into the future.
Working closely with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), CBI conducted an assessment of the risk to the bottomland hardwood/wetland forests of the US Southeast to the growing threat from the wood pellet industry largely to fuel power plants throughout the European Union (EU). The final report released by NRDC was entitled, “In the U.S. Southeast, Natural Forests are Being Felled to Send Fuels Overseas“.
This report details the threats facing Southeastern U.S. Forests, which is widely recognized as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, from the wood pellet industry, which has seen a 150 percent increase in wood pellet exports between 2012-2015. The report explains that 24 million acres of unprotected Southeastern forest lands are at risk and predicts that pellet manufacturing could increase to be twelve times larger than it currently is by 2020. For a one-hour webinar dedicated to this topic, see Bioenergy Threatens Wetland Forests of the US Southeast.
CBI is providing science and technical support to assist the California Energy Commission (CEC) in planning the state’s future energy needs, which includes achieving aggressive renewable energy goals with minimal damage to natural systems. Building off of previous work completed for the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP), CBI is working to improve access and transparency of scientific data, maps and analysis. As a subset of the work, CBI is supporting the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative 2.0 (RETI). RETI, according to the CEC, “is an open, transparent, and science-based process that will explore the abundant renewable generation resources in California and throughout the West, consider critical land use and environmental constraints, and identify potential transmission opportunities that could access and integrate renewable energy with the most environmental, economic, and community benefits.”
CBI is developing additional data, models, tools, and technical assistance that align with statewide energy and climate change adaptation planning. This work extends the information and tools previously built for the DRECP planning region to other areas of the state particularly in areas with high renewable energy potential.
Climate change and related impacts such as drought and wildfire are growing concerns throughout the state. In response, CBI is developing additional datasets and visualization applications to put this information into statewide context. CBI will deliver this data and information to the CEC and other California State agencies.
The Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint provides a common language and platform for publicly available data to support in depth conversations and informed decisions about the Santa Barbara County landscape. This collaborative project aims to describe the current landscape, natural resources, and community values about land in Santa Barbara County.
CBI is supporting this process for the Santa Barbara County region. The process is led by the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, Cachuma Resource Conservation District, and the Santa Barbara Foundation’s LEAF Initiative to develop a Conservation Gateway for Santa Barbara County. This process is also guided by a 12-member Steering Committee representing agriculture, conservation, resource management, and the natural sciences.
This data gathering and community engagement process led to a Conservation “Blueprint” (including a Data Basin Gateway) that is providing a science based decision-making platform for future conservation in the county, including acquisition, restoration and guidance for other potential land management opportunities. In the long-term, this process is expected to include collective visioning, tool- sharing and collaborative strategies. The effort will strengthen the region’s integrity by building community, sharing information, and facilitating stewardship.
Visit www.sbcblueprint.net to learn more about the Blueprint project and explore the online Atlas.
The U.S. Forest Service, Oregon State University, and Conservation Biology Institute have collaboratively developed the Seedlot Selection Tool to help forest managers match tree seed collections (called seedlots) with planting sites to help ensure the resilience of forests in a changing climate.
The Seedlot Selection Tool (or SST) is a free web-based decision-support tool that can be used to map planting locations based on either current climate data or a range of possible future climates across the conterminous U.S. and Mexico. Users can select a tree species, a climate scenario and relevant climate variables for the species, and other parameters to identify sources of seedlots appropriate for planting on a particular site or planting sites that are appropriate for planting seedlings from a particular seedlot. A valuable planning and educational tool, the SST helps explore possible future conditions, assess risk, and plan potential responses as part of a decision about which seedlot seedlings will be best adapted to a particular planting site in the future.
Seedlot Selection Tool Guidebook for US Forest Service Region 6 Silviculturists
Seedlot Selection Tool Video Tutorial for US Forest Service Region 6 Silviculturists
The SST was spearheaded by Glenn Howe at Oregon State University and Brad St. Clair at the USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station and developed by Nikolas Stevenson-Molnar, Brendan Ward, and Dominique Bachelet at CBI. Recently the USDA Climate Hub and USFS Region 6 staff worked with CBI to develop a step-by-step Guidebook and Video Tutorial for the Seedlot Selection Tool for Region 6 Silviculturists. These materials are useful to anyone who wants to learn about the use of this resource.
You may access the SST and detailed instructions at https://seedlotselectiontool.org/sst/.
Please see the USDA Climate Hub Seedlot Selection Tool Web Page for more information about the Guidebook and Tutorial Video.
Support for the SST came from the USFS, OSU, CBI, and the USDA Northwest Climate Hub.
CBI is providing scientific and technical support to Greenpeace Canada and AV Terrace Bay as they work together to maintain the ecological integrity of the Kenogami-Ogoki Forests in Ontario, Canada while providing a sustainable wood supply to the AV Terrace Bay mill and protecting cultural values of First Nations peoples.
There are two major, interrelated components of the project. First, CBI is examining a series of important aspects of woodland caribou conservation in the region, which has been a major focus throughout boreal Canada for a number of years as ongoing development is continually eroding woodland caribou habitat resulting in serious declines in some populations. Using data provided by the Ontario government, CBI is attempting to identify key caribou activity areas, regional movement patterns, and crucial habitat.
CBI is also creating a series of risk-based protected areas scenarios by defining areas of high landscape value and high biological value. High biological value is determined by considering representation of native ecosystems, overall forest values, concentrations of rare species, wetlands, and vital woodland caribou habitat.
Upon development of the scenarios, CBI will facilitate a discussion to review the trade-offs of the different scenarios between AV Terrace Bay and Greenpeace Canada, using Data Basin to support the discussion given the spatially explicit nature of the effort. In the end, the hope is to forge a land management agreement between the two parties that will allow for sustained economic development of the forest resources while protecting the ecological integrity of the region (including woodland caribou viability) and cultural values of the local First Nations peoples.
CBI is working with Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) and The Bureau of Land Management to develop decision support models to inform current conservation initiatives in Utah and throughout the Colorado Plateau ecoregion. Based on previous REA (Rapid Ecoregional Assessment) work, CBI is updating the existing terrestrial landscape and aquatic intactness models for the Colorado Plateau ecoregion as well as updating habitat profiles for a number of identified conservation elements of interest (largely native species and communities). CBI is extending the models to cover the entire state of Utah as well as fine-tuning the models to be more effective at answering different management questions over smaller geographic areas.
CBI is also updating a previously created climate stress logic model with the most recent climate data from the 5th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report as well as carryout some new analyses. For example, mapping potential climate refugia – areas where plants and animals may find shelter from changes in climatic conditions. CBI is also examining past and future climate variability to model climate velocity, which is the speed along the Earth’s surface needed to maintain constant climate conditions with the rationale being that species survival may depend as much on keeping pace with moving climate as the climate’s ultimate persistence. Results of the climate modeling will illustrate at the landscape level the degree to which locations in the landscape will be impacted by climate stress over the next century and help estimate the likelihood that certain species will survive shifting suitable habitat conditions.
Click here to see the console.
The Conservation Biology Institute, in collaboration with Ted Weller (USFS – Pacific Southwest Research Station) is expanding the functionality of Data Basin to create a clearinghouse for migratory bat detection data. This new functionality will allow users to: (1) import location-aware spreadsheet data into Data Basin; (2) dynamically visualize these locations and their attributes (such as number of bats of a particular species) within the interactive map; and, (3) explore charts of time series records across one or more locations. Additional tools under development will allow aggregation into a single master dataset, support form-based imports to more easily capture site and detector information from researchers during upload, and support export of records into spatial and non-spatial outputs.
More information about the exciting implications of this project can be found within an article on The Wildlife Society website.
Working as a subcontractor to Dynamac Corporation, the Conservation Biology Institute provided the scientific leadership and technical support for two BLM Rapid Ecoregional Assessment (REAs). The Sonoran Desert ecoregion was completed in the spring of 2012. A series of conservation elements were chosen for the eocregion and over 40 management questions addressed. Most questions pertained to a listed set of change agents, including urban and agriculture development, energy (including renewables), fire, invasive species, recreation, and climate change. For each conservation element, conceptual models were created and, for each specific management question, an accompanying GIS-based process model was created that outlined the data and steps necessary to generate an answer to the question. Part of the project required an exhaustive acquisition and review of available spatial data – hundreds the ecoregion. Extensive and sophisticated modeling had to be applied to multiple topics including target species habitat, natural ecological systems, climate change, invasive species, wildfire, and landscape integrity. Also, some custom analytical software had to be generated throughout the course of the project.
Project review was conducted using Data Basin and final results reside in a private group space on this web-based data management and mapping system. To inquire about access to the data and map-based results, please contact Karen Prentice at BLM Headquarters (kprentice@blm.gov).
To download the report and find out more information, Click Here.