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Rua Mordecai

South Atlantic aquatic connectivity assessment and tool
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) recently completed an unprecedented assessment of almost 14,000 dams in the Northeastern United States. The Northeast Aquatic Connectivity (NAC) project allows fisheries managers and other interested parties to assess dams at multiple scales based on their potential to benefit anadromous and resident fish species if removed or bypassed. This work has continued, with support from NOAA and USFWS, in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, where data refinements and further analysis have produced a web map and tool that allow users to interactively prioritize dams for mitigation at multiple scales and with varying criteria.The Southeast Aquatic Resources Partnership (SARP) has recently completed...
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We propose to support the revision and implementation of the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative’s Conservation Blueprint by integrating its Ecosystem Indicators into a structured decision support system that makes explicit how the Indicators are interrelated and how these will respond to management and policy interventions aimed at improving the conservation status of the South Atlantic region. Our specific objectives are to (1) develop ecological production functions that predict theecological impacts of selected conservation actions relative to current conditions, and to propagate these impacts through other affected systems or functions; (2) codify protocols for updating and curating geospatial...
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Enhancing the utility of International Shorebird Survey data management
Project Goals and Objectives:1) increase the utility of the International Shorebird Survey (ISS) for making shorebird management and conservation decisions within the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative, and2) create a single data management system that can service all partners along the Atlantic coastProject Summary:The utility of the International Shorebird Survey (ISS) has been greatly improved with an upgraded, user-friendly interface for data entry and retrieval. Manomet and ISS have contributed to the increasingly powerful citizen science bird records mechanism in eBird. Historic ISS data collected largely by volunteers as well as professional federal and state biologists over the last 40 years...
We will develop SMART-SLEUTH, an advanced spatially explicit modeling framework designed to augment the current SLEUTH model with sophisticated smart-growth capabilities. Based on the latest version of SLEUTH, we will create an open-source GIS-enabled software package that will implement SMART-SLEUTH with advanced modules and tools for evaluating, predicting, and visualizing smart growth scenarios and outcomes. In this software package, a more user friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI), a multi-level automatic calibration approach built on machine learning algorithms, and new spatial landscape metrics for quantifying land change patterns will provide enhanced support for complex model configuration, calibration,...
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This GIS layer predicts annual increases in water yield in gallons/acre when going from a longleaf stand that hasn’t been burned for 10+ years to one with a burn within the last 6 years. It uses PRISM data for precipitation, MODIS data for potential evapotranspiration, and field data from North Florida to estimate difference in evapotranspiration based on fire return interval. It uses the equations in the WASSI ecosystem services model to estimate change in water yield (https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/tools/wassi).Note: this layer covers the historic range of longleaf but does not mask out areas within that range unlikely to support longleaf (e.g., lakes, freshwater wetlands, etc.).Input data Potential evapotranspiration...
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