This website accompanies task 1 as described in the final report, “Comparability of landscape connectivity products for large-scale landscape planning.” The website is a compilation of data on recent, ongoing, and planned landscape connectivity modeling studies across the Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) network. As of April 2014, we have compiled data from 73 studies of 116 species. The vast majority of studies use circuit theory or least-cost paths to model connectivity, but other approaches represented in the database include graph theory, resistant kernel models, and models of genetic relatedness.
Enduring features (EFs; geophysical settings) are worthy conservation targets. We assembled data on EFs for the nation and performed an ecoregion-based GAP Analysis on their conservation status. Ecoregions that circumscribe mountains tend to have more EFs, and ecoregions in the west, where public lands make up more of the total land area, have more EFs within conservation lands. The middle of the country is relatively low in EF diversity, but nonetheless the number of EFs in conservation lands is low. Areas of high EF diversity in the Edwards Plateau also contained a diversity of rare species occurrences. We generated a new EF data set for the eastern USA and evaluated the distribution of rare species in terms of...
This project was funded to understand how, where, and why outputs from landscape connectivity models vary, and to suggest approaches to increase comparability and interoperability of models across Landscape Conservation Cooperative boundaries. We began by compiling metadata from 73 landscape connectivity modeling projects into an online, editable spreadsheet. Using spatial data from a subset of studies included in the database, we conducted an uncertainty analysis to understand how much spatial variation there was among predictions from different landscape connectivity models. Raw outputs from the original models showed relatively little overlap, averaging about 3% across all pairs of studies. However, when a common...
The purpose of this project was to design a national bat monitoring strategy to be used by State, Provincial, and Federal agencies, Tribes, and other partner organizations to monitor bat populations at various spatial scales. Another purpose was to establish a robust database to house the monitoring data as it is collected and maximize the utility of the data to researchers and resource managers. This was a coordinated effort among scientists and researchers in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey, National Park Service, and University of Tennessee, National Institute of Mathematical and Biological Synthesis.
Climate change is creating new challenges for biodiversity conservation. As temperatures, rainfall patterns, and sea levels change, distributions of plants and animals may shift geographically, altering their relationships with the environment and other species. As part of the response to climate change, the conservation community is starting to make decisions on longer time frames and with a focus on “adaptation” strategies to help species and habitats adjust. One of the first steps in adaptation planning is to conduct vulnerability assessments to identify which species or systems are likely to be most affected by climate change and why. Climate envelope models are an important tool used in vulnerability assessments...
A summary of products from the National Conservation Easement Database project, which added 14,137 new easements from 413 holders to the National Conservation Easement Database; this represents a 16% increase in number of easements in the Database. Most of these easements were from local governments and NGOs. More than 600 easements were digitized, making them available for planning and analysis purposes. More than 3,000 easements were updated to correct information such as boundaries. Significant outreach to the LCC community was made through personal contact and a webinar; all LCC’s now have access to the National Conservation Easement Database, which includes more than 100,000 easements protecting 20 million...
Human-induced climate change is increasingly recognized as a fundamental driver of biological processes and patterns, and a threat to the persistence of many species. Recent climate change has already caused shifts in the geographic ranges of myriad species and future climate change is expected to result in even greater redistributions of taxa. As a result, predicting the impact of climate change on future patterns of biodiversity has become a fundamental aspect of conservation planning. Here we use Audubon Christmas Bird Count and North American Breeding Bird Survey data in combination with detailed climate data and projections to estimate the current and future ranges of birds throughout the United States and...
The assessment of ecological integrity remains a primary component of present-day conservation strategies for freshwater ecosystems, but approaches vary widely in method, scale, efficiency, and sustainability. The need for standardized assessment practices have been noted in several national conservation initiatives. The range of approaches under development or in use by LCCs and partner agencies offered a timely opportunity to summarize the range of approaches, identify data that would facilitate particularly promising methods, and evaluate the success with which assessments are currently integrated into broad conservation planning and management. The investigators goals for this project were to provide LCCs and...
This database was compiled as a part of a species distribution modeling project, and contains species traits obtained from targeted literature searches for 26 threatened and endangered species located in Florida. All of the traits below are searchable through this query tool, and a list of species with data that match your criteria will be generated. All data can be exported to Excel. For more information, please select the links containing the project information and metadata.
The Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) Integrated Data Management Network (IDMN) worked with over 20 organizations over two years to bring coherence to the LCC information management landscape. Specifically, the IDMN Network tried to address ways LCC partners implemented the basic building blocks of data management. Issues addressed included building and sharing science products with partners, securely storing those data for the long term, and evaluating ways to get those outputs to cooperators and eventually the public. Over the course of the IDMN project, the scope was expanded to address ways to track projects that produced scientific outputs, as well as build communications products and tools to help community...
