A prototype for comparing landscape scale conservation strategies in the South Atlantic Coastal Plain, USA

Background/Question/Methods

The South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative is a diverse partnership dedicated to the conservation of natural resources. We collaborated with a representative group from the partnership to identify two overarching goals for conservation strategies:  1) helping partners choose strategies that are based on a shared scientific understanding about the landscape of the Southeast, and 2) helping partners solve shared problems with similar objectives.   With those goals in mind we identified three broad categories of objectives related to the conservation of cultural, socioeconomic, and natural resources.  This led to a generalized model for comparing conservation strategies, i.e., collections of specific actions, based on their marginal contributions to precise objectives in each of those categories.  From that generalized model we developed a heuristic algorithm to prioritize conservation spatially and temporally in the South Atlantic Coastal Plain across 115,500 sites.  The analysis includes uncertainty regarding likelihood of success, response of each specified objective, predictions for climate change, and urban growth.

Results/Conclusions

The results from our prototype, predict the relative change and uncertainty expected in bird and fish populations, production value, and cultural resources.  Thus, we illustrate locations where specific objectives are vulnerable to climate change and urban growth based on model assumptions.  We also estimate the marginal gains of several conservation strategies under cost constraints at several levels.  Because some conservation actions require relatively long periods of time before their full value is achieved, we used likelihood of success and marginal gains accrued over time to emulate the development of spatially and temporally explicit conservation strategies.  We then we use the overall value accrued to compare among strategies.  The heuristic model we developed is capable of incorporating many types of predictions for numerous objectives.  With increased specificity in the objective functions and improvements to the predictive models, this tool can be used to help inform conservation by the partnership.