Projects

FY2015

The mission of the Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative is to provide science and technology for conservation planning and action leading to a mutually desired landscape of the future (Nassauer and Opdam 2008, USFWS 2012).

The Mississippi River Basin / Gulf Hypoxia Initiative (MRB/GHI), spearheaded by seven LCCs, is undertaking a strategic and transparent process to create an integrated framework that supports planning, design, configuration, and delivery of wildlife conservation practices within the watershed.

The conservation community of the Caribbean can feel small, at times, or as vast as the ocean that
surrounds us. In a growingly complex world of environmental and social obstacles it is imperative to

The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (YKD) encompasses the southernmost, warmest parts of the arctic tundra biome and is renowned for its high biological productivity and large subsistence-based human population.

We are analyzing spatial factors of land cover transition in Puerto Rico and conducting state and transition simulation modeling of vegetation dynamics.

Water budgets and stream flows from El Yunque National Forest over the last decade

Modeling runoff using PRMS

Lidar assessment of habitat characteristics in NE Puerto Rico

Purpose of the PA-CAT:
To provide information and guidance in support of establishment and management of comprehensive protected areas systems in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Role/Tasks:

To enhance the chances of restoring and protecting Puerto Rico’s beaches by synthesizing guidelines and procedures on beach characterization and profiling, planting, fertilization, irrigation, maintenance, monitoring, etc.

An atlas to spatially present the best science about El Yunque National Forest to community groups involved in developing the new EYNF Management Plan

Sky Island Alliance will develop science and conservation-based guidance to assist natural resource managers in responding to expected climate change and other stressors on springs ecosystems in sky island regions of the Desert LCC.

A "gateway" using Data Basin technology has been developed to serve the data integration, collaboration and outreach needs of the NPLCC.

Oil and gas development in North Dakota is occurring at a rapid rate, and managers and biologists are ill-equipped to address and minimize damage from oil development and related activities on fish and wildlife habitat.

To inform management for a resilient and functioning landscape, we need to understand how the landscape is changing.

The University of Alaska Anchorage supported the development of a bibliography of natural and cultural resource information important the Northwest Boreal Region. This tool provides the ability to search a vast, curated database for the Northwest Boreal region in one place.

The recipient will collaborate with the BEACONs Project team to support the NWB LCC in the application of the Conservation Matrix Model (CMM), as developed by BEACONs, within the NWB LCC planning region.

Boreal ecosystems are inherently dynamic and continually change over decades to millennia. The braided rivers that shape the valleys and wetlands continually change course, creating and removing vast wetlands and peatlands.

Snowshoe hare populations fluctuate over a period of several years and are thought to send the cats on migration routes in what’s known as the “travelling wave” theory.

When climate change disrupts a village, city, state, or province, how do leaders respond? What unexpected obstacles do they run into? Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan want to know what factors are conducive to communities adapting to climate change.

Collaborate with the USFWS and its Northwest Boreal Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NWB LCC) Landscape Conservation Design (LCD) team to support the NWB LCC in the application of the Conservation Matrix Model (CMM), as developed by BEACONs, within the NWB LCC planning region.

One of the leading models for helping to understanding temperature and precipitation –PRISM—Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model—is used in Alaska and parts of Canada as input data in projections that seek to describe future scenarios of change.Currently no PRISM data are a

Support for the implementation of landscape conservation design through Alaska’s LCCs

This project was funded to understand how, where, and why outputs from landscape connectivity models vary, and to suggest approaches to increase comparability and interoperability of models across Landscape Conservation Cooperative boundaries.

This project modeled the effects of future climate change on bird distributions and their status in the lower 48 states. Its goal was to examine more than 600 species of birds and produce more than 100 predictive scenarios for each species, resulting in more than 600,000 data layers for birds.

As climate change progresses and stressors to biodiversity continue to expand across the landscape, conservation actions need to be increasingly targeted and effective.

The National Stream Internet (NSI) project was funded by the Landscape Conservation Cooperative program and led by researchers from USFS, CSIRO, NOAA, and USGS.

Successful conservation strategies in the face of climate change will require careful consideration of how changing climate will affect wildlife and habitats. Development of innovative, data-driven, accessible tools will assist in understanding and planning for those effects.

The identification of heavy metals such as mercury, and highly persistent lipophilic anthropogenic contaminants in the circumpolar food chain of all Arctic countries has raised awareness in wildlife scientists, and human health authorities on the need to better understand the possible climate-med

Natural resource managers and native communities have expressed a need for effectively synthesizing traditional knowledge and western science data. Often wildlife management plans are based on remotely sensed data and data collected by wildlife biologists.

The Arctic LCC created the Threatened Eider Geodatabase to serve as a repository for threatened eider distribution information. This database is intended to be a qualitative "first look" at where these two species of eider have been recorded and where surveys have been conducted.

This project facilitates research within the North Slope science community through improved data sharing and collaboration. This is achieved through the development and implementation of secure data services (SDS) protocols within the North Slope Science Catalog.

Federal land managers, non-governmental organizations, and industry have been developing ecological land classifications at regional and landscape-level for Alaska to aid in ecosystem management. An ecoregion map that covers the entire state was produced by Nowacki et al. (2002).

Information on geomorphological and
biological features for 1,095 km of shoreline mapped from the 2013 coastal
imaging survey of St. Lawrence Island. The habitat inventory is comprised of 1,994
along-shore segments (units), averaging 550 m in length (note that the AK Coast

The Arctic LCC and National Park Service has partnered together to complete a ShoreZone imagining and mapping project for the entire coastline, lagoons inclusive, from Point Hope to Wales in Northwestern Alaska.

Shorebirds are among the most abundant and visible high-latitude vertebrates. Their ecology makes them particularly sensitive to climate change in the arctic. The current distribution of shorebirds on the Arctic Coastal Plain is poorly known because accurate data exist from just a few locations.

The USGS St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center (USGS St. Pete) processed lidar topographic data in Alaska. Raw lidar data are not in a format that is generally usable by resource managers and scientists for scientific analysis.

There are many challenges in detecting precipitation trends in Alaska. The most substantial are the small number of observations, inhomogeneities, differences among gridded data sets, and differentiating between long-term trends and decadal variability.

The primary goal of this project was to predict climate-related changes in the timing and duration of insect prey availability for arctic-breeding shorebirds.

The most comprehensive historical aerial imagery of Alaska available to the public was collected as part
of the Alaska High-Altitude Aerial Photography Program (AHAP) during 1978-1986. Recent studies

The overarching goal of the project was to develop overlapping conceptual models of environmental and community health indicators in reference to climate forecasts.

The project incorporates Heiltsuk Traditional Knowledge and Values into ecosystem-based management planning within Strategic Landscape Reserve Design (SLRD) Landscape Units. The SLRD process seeks to identify areas to set aside from logging (harvesting) over short and long term timeframes.

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.

Lack of complete snow cover for the past 3 winters in southwestern Alaska has forced agencies to postpone moose surveys due to the likelihood of underestimating the population/lack of comparability to previous surveys.

Caribou are an important source of food for residents of western Alaska, but as environmental conditions and migration patterns change, some local hunters have encountered difficulty accessing the Mulchatna caribou herd (MCH).

Accidental introductions of rodents present one of the greatest threats to indigenous island biota. On uninhabited remote islands, such introductions are most likely to come from shipwrecks.

Project Objectives
Connect scientists/researchers to resource managers, review relevant science projects recently completed by the SRLCC and others, and discuss how resulting data and tools can be applied or incorporated into decision-making processes;

The Green River Basin Landscape Conservation Design project (GRB LCD) is an opportunity to think, plan, and act across boundaries and jurisdictions to meet mutual goals for agreed upon conservation targets in the ecosystems of the Green River Basin.

Using a bioclimatic envelope approach, University of Alberta investigators project how the distribution and abundance of boreal forest birds across North America will respond to different scenarios of future climate-change.