Projects By Category: Conservation Design

After two funding cycles, the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes (UM&GL) Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) decided a more strategic approach was needed to address theconservation priorities of the region.

This project connects scientists and managers from federal, tribal and state agencies and nongovernmental organizations to exchange information and establish common priorities for management of terrestrial wildlife populations.

Habitat fragmentation is considered to be a leading cause that is responsible for the long-term population declines of Northern Bobwhites.

Flow alteration -- from new and existing water supply projects, increased urbanization, and drought conditions -- is a pervasive threat to aquatic wildlife throughout the Gulf Coast Prairie region.

Alligator Gar, *Atractosteus spatula*, is an iconic species native to lowland floodplain river systems where they play an important role as top predators and by linking landscapes through their movement. Alligator Gar is also an important native fisheries species in the Trinity River.

The southeast United States’ rivers and streams support the most diverse unionid (freshwater mussel) fauna on earth.

Habitat fragmentation and degradation are considered to be a leading causes of long-term population declines of Northern Bobwhites and many other species of grassland birds, such as Eastern Meadowlark.  Research is needed to understand the factors causing habitat loss and fragmentation and to ide

The multi-LCC Mississippi River Basin/Gulf Hypoxia Initiative is a joint effort to find the nexus of water quality, wildlife, and people in the Mississippi River Basin.

Monarch butterfly and other pollinators are in trouble. Monarch butterfly habitat— including milkweed host plants and nectar food sources—has declined drastically throughout most of the United States.

The US FWS Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge is associated with a Lower Wabash River LCD team exploring voluntary conservation on public and private lands in a region with fairly cohesive ecology, issues and practices in mixed habitat types of uplands, wetlands and floodplain forest in the ma

The study seeks to provide a retrospective analysis of the relationships among bird abundance and distribution and changes in land cover and climate in the upper Midwest and Great Lakes region.  The resultant models will be used to provide spatially explicit forecasts of future avian responses. 

With the ultimate goal of conserving and restoring threatened native grassland prairies and the wildlife that depend on them, the National Audubon Society (Audubon) is facilitating a landscape conservation design for the grassland birds in the greater Chicago region.

Brief:

Under this project a collaborative and integrated geodatabase of inventoried connectivity barriers within the South Central Lake Superior Basin (SCLSB) was developed to prioritize restoration for more than 2,000 inventoried stream crossings. 

In the tropics, ample freshwater is the primary resource supporting thriving human and ecological communities. In the Pacific Islands, many watersheds are threatened by climate change, urban encroachment, and invasion by water-demanding exotic plant species like strawberry guava (SG).

The primary objective of this project is to bring together Hawaii's climate change scientists, Molokai's traditional fishpond managers, and other natural resource managers to share scientific and cultural knowledge and work together as a team to identify adaptive management strategies for two of

The specific objectives of this contract are to identify and categorize key differences and similarities between islands and continental systems that are relevant to achieving sustainable landscapes/seascapes at regional scales; to develop a conservation framework that integrates planning process

Complete the National Wetlands Inventory for the remaining portion of the LCC using existing imagery.  Needed to develop geospatial models based on landscape-level land use and to aid in monitoring wetlands to assess effects of climate change.

WWF and partners will assess the probability of grasslands being converted to cropland in the Northern Great Plains by analyzing land characteristics (e.g. soil properties conducive to specific crops), climate variables (e.g.

The Cascadia Partner Forum fosters a network of natural resource practitioners working with the Great Northern and North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperatives to build the adaptive capacity of the landscape and species living within it.

The Cascadia Parner Forum fosters a network of natural resource practitioners working with the NPLCC and GNLCC to guild the adaptive capacity of the landscape and species living within it.

This project will create a targeted and easily understandable guide to tools that support landscape-level planning in the face of climate change for NPLCC partners. The guide will build on previous NPLCC research on decision support needs with an emphasis on tools currently in use in the region.

This project used sound science and best management practices in the development and preparation of a coast redwoods for climate change workshop and related field trip involving multiple partners and others.

This project will provide a comprehensive synthesis of beaver recolonization science and techniques for successful reintroduction or population expansion through a thorough, in-depth, coordinated review of all North American beaver-related information, including identification of research gaps an

This project will provide a comprehensive synthesis of beaver recolonization science and techniques for successful reintroduction or population expansion through a thorough, in-depth, coordinated review of all North American beaver-related information, including identification of research gaps an

The Quartz Valley Indian Reservation will partner with tribes, federal agencies and higher education institutions in the Klamath Basin on a tribal youth intern program for the summer of 2014.

We will translate existing modeled hydroclimatic data into metrics used for water crossing design and replacement.

This project aims to support dry forest and savannah habitats in The Georgia Basin. Management objectives are to synthesize existing data into GIS tools that will prioritize land acquisition and conservation investment.

The Cascadia Partner Forum fosters a network of natural resource practitioners working with the Great Northern and North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperatives to build the adaptive capacity of the landscape and species living within it.

This project is being closely coordinated with a companion project funded by the North Atlantic LCC.

Due to the uncertainty of future climatic patterns and species responses, enduring features of the landscape (geophysical settings) are appropriate targets of assessment, planning, and conservation.

Foster cross-boundary integration and synthesis of landscape conservation design efforts across LCCs by 1) identifying opportunities and challenges in alternative methodologies for making individual LCC's design efforts compatible and 2) to implement a pilot effort to demonstrate these '

The Pacific Region National Wildlife Refuge System developed a strategic approach to identify region-wide land/habitat conservation priorities. This approach was piloted in the Columbia Plateau Ecoregion and resulted in a high-level landscape-scale conservation design.

FY2013

Sea level rise caused by climate change is an ongoing phenomenon and a concern both locally and worldwide.

The Lower Rio Grande Valley in south Texas is one of the largest migratory bird stopovers in North America and a major birding hotspot.

Overgrazing and fire suppression have led to a loss of deep soils and vegetative cover in the 420,000 acre Alamosa Creek watershed in southwestern New Mexico.

University of Arizona will conduct an ecosystem conservation assessment for the lower San Pedro (LSP) watershed.

The substantially natural hydrography of the upper Gila River supports one of the highest levels of aquatic and riparian biodiversity in the region, including the largest complement of native fishes and some of the best remaining riparian habitat in the lower Colorado River Basin.

Texas Tech University will conduct quantitative and predictive analysis of the connectivity of isolated desert "wetlands", that include tinajas, the name for eroded pools in bedrock, for 20 wildlife species over the Sonoran desert ecoregion.

An Iowa State University research team in collaboration with Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge and other partners has discovered that strategically adding a little bit of prairie back onto the agricultural landscape can result in many benefits – for water and soil quality, habitat for wildlife

FY2013
The proposed project's objective is to provide a scientific review of

Goal: Identify actions that will maximize the adaptive capacity of priority species, habitat, and ecosystems to support an ecologically connected Central Valley landscape.

In the desert southwest biodiversity is facing a changing landscape due to human population growth, expansion of energy development, and from the persistent effects of climate change among other threats.

There is currently have a very poor understanding of how climate change will affect food web structure and mercury accumulation in lakes on the Arctic Coastal Plain of Alaska. In this study, researchers are addressing this knowledge gap by adopting a space-for-time approach.

Arctic wetlands, where millions of local and migratory birds nest, are composed of a mosaic of ice wedge polygons, non-patterned tundra, and large vegetated drained thaw lake basins.

This project will expand abundance & distribution models for seabirds, currently underway in Aleutian Is region (USFWS-funded project under Survey, Monitoring & Assessment program) to the greater ABSI-LCC region, and integrate 2013 seabird surveys into the analysis.

The occurrence of Potentially Toxic Elements (PTEs) in the Arctic and sub-Arctic is of major concern for the sensitive ecosystems and the humans and aquatic flora and fauna in this region.