This webinar originally aired on 13 July 2011.
Regional and local agencies in charge of policy-making and land use planning are in great need of increased technical capacity for conducting the kind of analyses and planning necessary to address coastal conservation challenges. This project provided scientific and technical assistance to increase such capacity within participating state, regional, and local government entities and enable them to develop and establish concrete and scientifically defensible plans of action for conserving Georgia’s coastal ecosystems and species.
NatureServe worked with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to apply the NatureServe Vista decision support tool within a broader toolkit that included Maxent for species distribution modeling, Circuitscape for modeling habitat connectivity, and Marxan for generating optimal conservation priority networks. Vista was used to develop the following summaries and assessments:
- integrate all of the map and expert knowledge information on conservation elements (an extensive list of ecosystems, priority biological communities, and individual species)
- characterize a current scenario, and a future scenario with expected future development, and a projection of sea level rise
- assess the impacts of each scenario
- interoperate with Marxan to generate a conservation priority network for the region
- downscale the regional project to two county-level projects
- integrate more detailed county land use data and evaluate the scenarios at the county level
This webinar was presented by Patrick Crist and Ian Varley.