The concept of adaptive management provides a set of good business principles to guide strategic habitat conservation, but these principles are only useful if they are put into practice through a complimentary set of business operations. To that end, if conservation is going to be successful operating at landscape scales, the conservation community must start thinking and functioning like a conservation enterprise. Much more emphasis must be placed on developing and supporting business operations that facilitate the flow of information and other resources at landscape scales. Just like successful national and global businesses, we need to develop an information supply chain to support the communication, coordination, and decision making that leads to the strategic allocation of those limited funding, human, and material resources. Developing these business operations will require a new age of research and equitable attention to the; a) development, b) management, c) integration, and d) delivery of the raw materials (data, information, and knowledge) and component parts (models and decision tools) to decision makers. To begin addressing this need The Nature Conservancy and U.S. Geological Survey are working with a broad network of natural resource and information technology professionals, within and outside of conservation, to design and develop a prototype for a web-based Great Lakes Information Management and Delivery System (now known as Great Lakes Inform) that will support strategic habitat conservation and the mission of the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes LCC .
The primary deliverable for this project is a web-based information management and delivery system consisting of six integrated modules that work together to; a) facilitate education, communication, development of shared conservation goals and b) locating data, knowledge, and decision tools relevant to a user’s particular question or decision. These six modules are;
- Knowledge Network: Provides users with conservation knowledge needed to effectively interpret data available in other IMDS modules and promote informed conservation decisions communication
- Visualization Module: Allow users to efficiently query, and find existing web-based visualizations relevant to the conservation of the Great Lakes ecosystem
- Data Catalog: Allow users to efficiently query and find data relevant to the conservation of the Great Lakes
- Decision Tools: Allow users to efficiently identify, locate, and compare models and decision tools that support assessment, forecasting and planning for strategically conserving the Great Lakes ecosystem
- Project Tracking: Allow users to effectively track and coordinate the implementation of conservation actions by providing mapped locations of past, ongoing, and proposed conservation projects and the ability to query and summarize relevant information within and across these projects
- Assess and Adapt: Allow users to locate and obtain relevant sets of status and trend indicators across related ecological attributes, human activities and conservation actions
Update: The Great Lakes Information Management and Delivery System (IMDS) is now Great Lakes Inform (web link below). This phase of the project ended in 2013, but in 2015, The Nature Conservancy entered into a partnership with the Great Lakes Commission to develop the Blue Accounting program and online platform (that is built upon the IMDS principles) to collectively serve and deliver relevant information to decision makers and support collaboration to address key Great Lakes issues. The Great Lakes IMDS project that the LCC funded has played a critical role in the development of the Blue Accounting program and platform. Blue Accounting is combining Great Lakes Inform and GLC’s Great Lakes Information Network to deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time. It is also bringing together key stakeholders to set region-wide goals and determine how best to track progress against those goals through this new integrated platform. For more information about Blue Accounting, contact Shawn Weis.
