Resources

Landscape Conservation Cooperatives develop landscape conservation designs as mechanisms for identifying, designing, and delivering (through partners) an ecologically connected network of landscapes and seascapes adaptable to global change.

The Landscape Climate Dashboard is a new visualization tool that helps you to explore future climate projections and soil site sensitivity for federally and tribally protected lands across the California, Pacific Northwest, Great Basin and Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) boundaries in the Western United States.

Biophysical transformations of riparian ecosystems over the last century have resulted in exotic species and heavy and flashy fuels that, together with severe droughts in last 3-50 years, are driving anomalous fire intensities and frequencies in many bottomland riverine ecosystems.

Management of dryland ecosystems is challenged by high heterogeneity in soil-geomorphic attributes, low and variable precipitation, and ecosystem dynamics prone to threshold or hysteresis type transitions. The Colorado Plateau, like many dryland ecosystems globally, has seen a recent up-tick in high-intensity land-uses, most notably oil and gas development. We will present new tools and techniques for assessing land-use impacts across broad regions that explicitly accounts for heterogeneity in ecological potential imposed by soil & geomorphic factors (Automated Reference Tool; ART).

The Pacific Islands Climate Change Cooperative (PICCC) created the Hawaiian Islands Terrestrial Adaptation Initiative (HITAI) to develop science-based syntheses of climate impacts on, and adaptation options for, terrestrial and freshwater resources on each of the main Hawaiian Islands. This project brings together Hawaii’s resource managers and conservation planners to discuss these challenges, share knowledge, identify needs, and prioritize key actions to reduce the vulnerability of resources to climate change. 

LANDFIRE presents this webinar in partnership with the Great Basin Fire Science Exchange and the Great Basin, Great Northern, and Southern Rockies Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs).

Greater sage-grouse populations have declined substantially over the last several decades. Concurrently, the density of fences and other anthropogenic structures has increased dramatically in sagebrush habitats, with potential negative impacts on sage-grouse. Markers have been applied to fences to reduce sage-grouse collisions with fencing, yet there is little empirical evidence on their efficacy as well as how fencing characteristics and surrounding landscape influence the probability of collisions.

This plan includes the Great Basin LCC’s updated vision and mission statement and sets out the key goals and objectives for the organization over the next five years.

This newsletter features: Steering Committee meeting details and logistics, LCC strategic plan and operational procedures update, and other LCC news.

Floodplains pose challenges to managers of conservation lands because of constantly changing interactions with their rivers. Bouska et al. conducted an online survey with 80 resource managers of floodplain conservation lands along the Upper and Middle Mississippi River and Lower Missouri River, USA, to evaluate management priority, management intensity, and available scientific information for management objectives and conservation targets.

Landscape conservation design is of broad importance for achieving the goals of the Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) Network. This document articulates the LCC Network’s Definition of landscape conservation design.

The LCC Network Story Map showcases 22 stories from the 22 LCCs and features signature projects that demonstrate the breadth and depth of partner-driven accomplishments. The map works best using Internet Explorer as the browser. 

This newsletter features: new newsletter format, confirmation of action plan amendments, co-chair nominations, progress since May meeting, fall meeting update.

On August 24, 2016, Tim Brown and Greg McCurdy, Desert Research Institute, and Kathryn Dyer, BLM Nevada, presented a webinar about climate monitoring for land management applications in the Great Basin.

The Northwest Boreal Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NWB LCC) is a voluntary, diverse, self-directed management-science partnership, informing and promoting integrated science, sustainable natural and cultural resource management, and conservation to address impacts of climate change and other stressors within and across ecosystems. The NWB LCC area includes parts of Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and British Columbia.

Springs serve as an important water source for rural communities, symbolic and sacred places for many tribes, and vital aquatic and riparian environments in arid lands. This report, supported by the Great Basin LCC and produced by Donald Sada and Alexandra Lutz of the Desert Research Institute, examined data from 2,256 springs collected between the late 1980s into 2013.

This map and prioritization tool are designed to be screening-level tools that can be used to help investigate potential fish passage/aquatic organism passage opportunities in the Southeast U.S. in the context of of many ecological factors. It is the result of a project conducted to focus on assessing dams based on their ecological benefit if removed or bypassed.

This video put together by Freshwaters Illustrated is another pieces of the project and serves as a great mechanism to increase awareness about aquatic connectivity issues in the Southeast.

Since 2010, the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes LCC has evolved from strictly providing funding for landscape science production, to facilitating the use of existing and new science toward the development of landscape conservation strategies. This presentation discusses that evolution and how the UMGL LCC's landscape conservation approach is being applied toward conservation outcomes through strategic restoration of aquatic habitat connectivity and conservation of Great Lakes coastal wetlands.

Climate change is altering coastal environments and how conservation is approached. To address this challenge, NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management has produced a new Guide for Considering Climate Change in Coastal Conservation, along with a companion How to Consider Climate Change in Coastal Conservation self-guided online resource. Together, these products help practitioners evaluate how their conservation efforts can endure amid changing conditions, placing communities and natural environments in the best position to adapt.

On July 21, 2016, Dr. Samantha Chisholm Hatfield of Oregon State University presented findings from her research on Native cultural responses to climate change in the Great Basin.

Speakers: Dr. Thomas Edwards, USGS Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Utah State University and Dr. Edd Hammill, Assistant Professor,  Utah State University

This presentation will be delivered live at the USFWS Region 6 Office in Lakewood, CO and via webinar. The speakers will highlight results of a 4-year effort that organized extant data on 21 ESA listed, rare and sensitive plant species in the Colorado Plateau, collected new data on plant locations, and developed distribution models indicating likelihoods of plants being present in specified locations.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wetland Inventory has been the source of the Nation’s most comprehensive wetland dataset since the 1970s. The NWI 2.0 dataset is a more comprehensive characterization of all surface water features on the landscape, including a wide range of wetlands and other aquatic ecosystems, like streams. Although there have been distinct wetland and stream datasets in the past, this information has never been presented together as a single polygonal dataset of over 32 million features using a consistent ecologic classification system.

On June 27, 2016, speakers Dominique Bachelet, Conservation Biology Institute, and Dave Hopper, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, discussed the need for reliable, usable tools and data sources to meet climate change-related land management challenges.

This Pollinator Partnership Action Plan (PPAP) provides examples of successful past and ongoing collaborations between the Federal government and non-Federal institutions to support pollinator health. It also highlights areas that are ripe for future collaboration. The primary audiences for the PPAP are state and local governments, private companies, universities, community organizations, and other entities that organize and/or represent citizen stakeholders and have the resources needed to implement and support collaborative efforts with Federal agencies.