Resources

Mapping of barriers and statistical prediction of their passability is now fairly complete in the Great Lakes basin, yet field assessments of barrier characteristics and passability to migratory fishes are spotty. We will use the Lake Michigan basin as a pilot area for comprehensive field assessment of dam condition, dimensions, and passage technologies. These characteristics will be incorporated into our barrier database, enabling improved estimates of removal costs, watershed cumulative passability, and infrastructure maintenance challenges.

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. As a first step in this process standardized avian point count surveys conducted primarily by citizen volunteers were combined with landcover composition and configuration, soils, and vegetation productivity data to model abundance of five grassland bird species.

Climate change is expected to alter the distributions and community composition of stream fishes in the Great Lakes region in the 21st century, in part as a result of altered hydrological systems (stream temperature, streamflow, and habitat). Resource managers need information and tools to understand where fish species and stream habitats are expected to change under future conditions.

In many large ecosystems, conservation projects are selected by a diverse set of actors operating independently at spatial scales ranging from local to international. Although small-scale decision making can leverage local expert knowledge, it also may be an inefficient means of achieving large-scale objectives if piecemeal efforts are poorly coordinated. Here, we assess the value of coordinating efforts in both space and time to maximize the restoration of aquatic ecosystem connectivity.

A key challenge in aquatic restoration efforts is documenting locations where ecological connectivity is disrupted in water bodies that are dammed or crossed by roads (road crossings). To prioritize actions aimed at restoring connectivity, we argue that there is a need for systematic inventories of these potential barriers at regional and national scales. Here, we address this limitation for the North American Great Lakes basin by compiling the best available spatial data on the locations of dams and road crossings.

There is mounting concern that climate change will lead to the collapse of cyclic population dynamics, yet the influence of climate variability on population cycling remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that variability in survival and fecundity, driven by climate variability at different points in the life cycle, scales up from local populations to drive regional characteristics of population cycling and spatial synchronization.

Full life-cycle vulnerability assessments are identifying the effects of climate change on nongame migratory birds that are of conservation concern and breed in the upper Midwest and Great Lakes region. Full life-cycle analyses are critical, as current efforts likely underestimate the vulnerability of migratory land birds due to a focus on assessing only one component of the annual cycle.

Forest-dominated landscapes provide a wide range of ecosystem services to many different sectors of society, including forest products (e.g., timber), recreational opportunities and support of tourism, carbon sequestration, and habitat for fish and wildlife and other biodiversity.  However, many forests and embedded aquatic systems in the Northwoods are in degraded condition due to land and resource management decisions, impacts of over-abundant deer populations, and the spread of nonnative forest pests and pathogens that have led to “surprise” losses of key tree species.

Climate change is expected to drastically change the environmental conditions which forests depend. Lags in tree species movements will likely be outpaced by a more rapidly changing climate. This may result in species extirpation, a change in forest structure, and a decline in resistance and resilience (i.e., the ability to persist and recover from external perturbations, respectively). In the northern Great Lakes region of North America, an ecotone exists along the boreal-temperate transition zone where large changes in species composition exist across a climate gradient.

Indiana’s State Wildlife Action Plan was completed in 2005. The plan identified Indiana’s priority needs for all fish and wildlife species and priority efforts to address those needs. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) developed a network of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs). The purpose of the LCCs is to provide applied science to increase the efficiency of conservation delivery for conservation priorities shared by FWS, the States and other conservation partners in the face of climate change and other landscape-scale conservation challenges.

The Northwest Boreal Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NWB LCC) is a partnership between agencies involved in land management across Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and British Columbia. The NWB LCC aims to coordinate science and support to decision makers for improving land management decisions. Knowledge gaps have been identified by the NWB LCC and are beginning to be filled. One of the priority information gaps is knowledge of the anthropogenic footprint currently on the landscape.

There are more and more researchers in the North who want their work to benefit northerners, and wonder if their results are relevant to the communities they work near or with. This project reviewed five climate adaptation plans written in the Yukon over the past decade and conducted interviews focusing on the Dawson Climate Change Adaptation plan. The report outlines several barriers to incorporating climate research in the plans: a perception of climate change research, relevance and accessibility of research, communication, educational history, and human chemistry.

The Northwest Boreal Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NWB LCC) is a partnership between agencies involved in land management across Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and British Columbia. The NWB LCC aims to coordinate science and support to decision makers for improving land management decisions. Knowledge gaps have been identified by the NWB LCC and are beginning to be filled. One of the priority information gaps is knowledge of the anthropogenic footprint currently on the landscape.

The Blueprint 2.2 Data Gallery is a website dedicated to the final Blueprint 2.2 spatial data. This website is located on the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative's Conservation Planning Atlas. On this website, users can explore the final Blueprint 2.2 spatial data as well as the spatial data used to create Blueprint 2.2. This website features an interactive mapping feature so that users who do not have access to desktop GIS can explore the spatial data.

The Blueprint 2.0 Data Download is a .zip file containing all of the spatial data associated with the Blueprint 2.0.

The Blueprint 2.1 Data Gallery is a website dedicated to the final Blueprint 2.1 spatial data. This website is located on the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative's Conservation Planning Atlas. On this website, users can explore the final Blueprint 2.1 spatial data as well as the spatial data used to create Blueprint 2.1. This website features an interactive mapping feature so that users who do not have access to desktop GIS can explore the spatial data.

The Blueprint 2.2 Data Download is a .zip file containing all of the spatial data associated with the Blueprint 2.2.

The Blueprint 2.0 Development Process is a final report that explains in detail how the Conservation Blueprint was created. It first provides an overview of the South Atlantic LCC and the Blueprint framework, then combines the metadata available on the Conservation Planning Atlas for all ecosystem maps, ecosystem indicators, ecosystem scores, corridors, and final Blueprint priorities. It is intended to serve as a comprehensive guide to the Blueprint objectives, data sources, and methodology that could enable an interested reader to reproduce the Blueprint independently.

The original Simple Viewer displayed the South Atlantic Conservation Blueprint 1.0 at the subwatershed and marine lease block scale. In this interface you could also find information about other landscape scale conservation plans, land cover, and protection status.

The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation – Natural Heritage Program (DCRDNH) and the Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI) at Florida State University (collectively, Project Partners) were funded by the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (SALCC) in April 2015 to develop ten species distribution models (SDM) of priority at-risk and range-restricted species (Ambystoma cingulatum, Echinacea laevigata, Heterodon simus, Lindera melissifolia, Lythrum curtissii, Notophthalmus perstriatus, Phemeranthus piedmontanus, Rhus michauxii, and Schwalbea americana) for the purp

Salt marshes classification of the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative geography covers the northern Outer Banks (and extreme southeastern Virginia, Back Bay area) south through NC, SC, and Georgia to approximately Sapelo Island. The marsh classification is derived from Landsat 8 OLI imagery acquired in May 14-19, 2014.

The rivers and streams of the Southeastern United States are extremely diverse, containing numerous threatened and endangered species. In fact, southeastern rivers contain more at-risk freshwater fish and invertebrates than any other region of the country.

The Blueprint 1.0 Data Download contains an ArcMap map package (.mpk) containing the spatial data associated with the Blueprint 1.0.



Blueprint 1.0 Description

The rivers and streams of the Southeastern United States are extremely diverse, containing numerous threatened and endangered species. In fact, southeastern rivers contain more at-risk freshwater fish and invertebrates than any other region of the country.