The South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) is a partnership of federal, state, and local organizations committed to sustaining the region’s natural and cultural resources for current and future generations. To accomplish this goal, the South Atlantic LCC developed the Conservation Blueprint, a living spatial plan that identifies the best places for shared conservation action across the South Atlantic geography. The current version of the Blueprint (version 2.0) is a data-driven plan based on ecological indicator models and a connectivity analysis. It identifies priority areas for shared conservation action and corridors spanning the region’s terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. Blueprint 2.0 also considers future change by incorporating sea-level rise and urbanization projections. So far, more than 400 individuals from over 100 organizations have actively participated in developing and refining the Blueprint. The South Atlantic LCC provides two online platforms to access the Blueprint: the Conservation Planning Atlas (CPA) and the Simple Viewer. The CPA is a mapping platform that allows users to access spatial data, perform basic analyses, and create maps. The Simple Viewer is a custom interface for exploring the Blueprint, the indicators, and a small suite of ancillary datasets summarized at a sub-watershed or marine lease block scale.
Results/Conclusions
The South Atlantic LCC is unique in its commitment to a “lean startup” process, a methodology that originated in the manufacturing and technology sectors. The lean startup method emphasizes rapid iterations through the building, testing, and revision cycle and, in many ways, parallels the adaptive management framework. We present the multidisciplinary approaches used to build, test, and revise the Conservation Blueprint and its associated interfaces, which include one-on-one interviews, paper prototyping techniques borrowed from the software development field, and agile software development. Incorporating these principles from other disciplines has led to better products, faster product delivery, and increased stakeholder engagement—a vital step in collaborative conservation. Today, conservation practitioners are already implementing the Blueprint to inform action and investment across the South Atlantic geography. The Blueprint has helped members of the cooperative attract national fire resilience funding to the region, compete for coastal wetlands protection and climate-smart wildlife management grants, provide landscape-scale context for public lands planning, and prioritize fish passage efforts