Projects By Category: Decision Support

Although the importance of landscape connectivity for large-scale conservation planning is widely-appreciated, the use and integration of products resulting from disparate modeling exercises is problematic.

Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) have a critical need for information management processes that facilitate science product (i.e., data, analysis and decision tools, documents) sharing; data storage, security, and dissemination; and project tracking, communication and collaboration tools

The LCC Performance Measures Project is intended to: Follow the direction of the LCC Performance Measures Working Group; Assess the needs of individual LCCs specific to Performance Measures (PM); Assess the needs of the LCC network specific to PM; Review PM frameworks from natural resource and so

The NCED partnership was initiated through a grant from the US Endowment for Forestry and Communities (the Endowment) to begin the development of a first-ever database covering easement data nationwide.

Accurate, high-resolution, spatially consistent information on water quality and aquatic biotas for rivers and streams is needed nationally to improve strategic coordination among agencies and the effectiveness of management and conservation efforts.

Numerous studies show that ongoing climate change will have major effects on the distribution and conservation status of much of our biodiversity.

Numerous studies show that ongoing climate change will have major effects on the distribution and conservation status of much of our biodiversity.

The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) has been working collaboratively with the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service (USFS) to inventory and map current and potential distributions of plant communities which support species of cultural concern on federal la

The Canadian portion of the Crown of the Continent (CCoC) ecosystem has been identified as crucial for wolverines north of the US border to rescue or supply individuals and genes through dispersal to the highly fragmented population in the northern US Rocky Mountains.

We developed multi-scale habitat suitability models for black-tailed prairie dogs (BTPD) in the southwestern Great Plains, corresponding to the western region of the Great Plains LCC.

This project highlights the potential for LCCs to facilitate collaboration among conservation practitioners and research scientists to plan for the future.

This project highlights the potential for LCCs to facilitate collaboration among conservation practitioners and research scientists to plan for the future.

This project studies the Clapper Rail (Rallus longirostris) as an indicator of Gulf Coast tidal marsh habitat change.

Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (MTFWP) has been involved with developing a crucial areas statewide Decision Support System (DSS) since 2008 in parallel with activities from the Western Governors Association (WGA).

Landscape simulation modeling will be used to develop detailed management guidelines for restoring and sustaining whitebark pine under future climates, accounting for the principal stressors that threaten its persistence (exotic disease infections, mountain pine beetles, and fire exclusion polici

This project aims to provide large landscape practitioners of the U.S. Northern Rockies with a decision support tool for prioritizing conservation action to mitigate road impacts on wildlife corridors.

We will develop an approach to identify fire refugia in Rocky Mountain ecosystems of the U.S. and Canada then test the function of refugia for biodiversity conservation under current and future climate/fire scenarios.

FY2014

FY2014
The goals for the project are

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

The Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership, a partner in the Gulf Coast Prairie Landscape Conservation Cooperative, is advancing instream flow science by developing basic information necessary to support flow standards and water management recommendations for waterways throughout the region.

Grassland-shrubland prairie has been important to the livelihoods of generations of ranchers; to the hunting community because of prized game species; and to endangered species, such as the black-capped vireo, as habitat.

The Gulf Coastal Plains and Ozarks Landscape Conservation Cooperative Geomatics Working Group developed an on-line platform to serve geospatial data in a consistent manner that also allows end-users to easily discover, access, and integrate existing data and tools without dedicated GIS software o

FY2013

FY2013

The Grassland, Shrubland, Desert Program of the U.S.

In February 2014, taking action to implement a 2012 U.S.-Mexico agreement on the Colorado River known as Minute 319, International Boundary and Water Commissioners (IBWC) Edward Drusina and Roberto Fernando Salmon Castelo announced plans to move forward with a one-time pulse flow (a release of wa

Our approach will include sampling a wide range of habitats and environmental conditions throughout the middle and lower Pecos River basin, across an 18 month time-span to account for seasonal and phenological events.

Assessing the vulnerability of species or ecosystems to climate change and formulating appropriate management responses requires predictions of the exposure and sensitivity of the species or ecosystems to projected changes.

Southern Nevada Water Authority will add new modeling and analytical capabilities to tools developed as part of a previous WaterSMART Climate Analysis Tools Grant that assessed impacts of climate change on water quality and sediment transport in Lake Mead.

Museum of Northern Arizona, Inc. will leverage tools previously developed by the Springs Stewardship Initiative to help resource managers in the southwestern U.S.

Topock Marsh is a large wetland adjacent to the Colorado River and main feature of Havasu National Wildlife Refuge (Havasu NWR) in southern Arizona. In 2010, U.S.

Explore climate change impacts on vegetation across the Desert and Southern Rockies LCCs using historical monitoring data collected from 23 sites across the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, Mojave and Colorado Plateau deserts for 30-50 years.

Freshwater systems are critically imperiled and continue to be threatened by human encroachment and water development.

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.

Provide decision support through develpoment of models and DSTs that inform conservation delivery for easements and habitat management within the LCA that address population and habitat objectives for surrogate species.

Researchers with U.S.

Seven Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) are working together to identify key scientific uncertainties associated with design and management of a sustainable ecosystem/floodplain landscape that provides multiple benefits for agricultural productivity, water quality, and wildlife conservat

The importance of riparian ecosystems in semiarid and arid regions has generated interest in understanding processes that drive the distribution and abundance of dominant riparian plants.

FY2013
Cheatgrass die-offs are unexplained instances of stand failure observed in areas of Nevada and Utah, where cheatgrass fails to grow even though it has been a dominant component of plant communities in the past. The goals of this project are to:

Projected water deficits mean that land and water managers must be proactive in their management of rivers and shallow aquifers, if they want to maintain the ecosystems dependent upon them.

A strong data foundation is needed to inform science-based decisions for fisheries management at a watershed level.

The project objective is to transfer to California a previously developed prioritization framework that combines intraspecific genetic and morphological variation with traditionally used indices of biodiversity, and test its general utility for conservation prioritization.

This project supports a collaborative, multi-stakeholder effort led by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to develop a largescale vulnerability assessment and associated adaptation strategies for focal resources of the Sierra Nevada.

To be successful, natural resource managers need to synthesize diverse information on the effects of management actions, climate change and other stressors on wildlife populations at appropriate scales.

Phase 1 (2013): The Northern California Coastal Forest ecoregion is dominated by coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) covering 13,300 km2 from just north of the California-Oregon border to Santa Cruz County, California, extending ~60 km inland.

Project Objectives
In collaboration with the staff, members and partners of the Caribbean
Landscape Conservation Cooperative (CLCC), SustainaMetrix conducted
a process to assemble the foundation of an ecosystem governance

Despite the lack of surface flows, the Colorado River riparian corridor in Mexico has proven to be ecologically resilient. Floods in the 1980s and 90s in the region brought back large swaths of native riparian habitat, which still persist today in some areas along the river.

A combination of citizen science inventories and expert assessments will be used to collect critical baseline information on known spring and seep resources using the Spring Ecosystem Inventory and Assessment Protocols and adapting them as needed for the unique arid Sky Island ecosystems.

Perennial streams in the Desert LCC support riparian trees such as cottonwood (Populus spp) and box elder (Acer negundo) that are critical components of habitat for riparian obligate birds and other wildlife species (Webb et al. 2007).