Greg Low - Path User Conference 2011

Forecasting the Benefits of Conservation Strategies for Land Managers

Greg Low

Applied Conservation Inc.

“If you had a dollar to spend on conserving the ecological systems in a landscape, where would you invest it first? To help land managers answer this question, staff from Applied Conservation and The Nature Conservancy’s Nevada office have deployed Landscape Conservation Forecasting ™ (aka Enhanced Conservation Action Planning) at national forests, national parks and BLM lands in four states from California to Tennessee. The methods include: (1) using satellite imagery to assess the health of ecological systems; (2) employing ecological models using VDDT to demonstrate how those systems will change over time; (3) utilizing VDDT simulations to assess how alternative management actions can influence those changes; (4) measuring success by calculating an ecosystem’s departure from its natural range of variability, on a scale of 1 – 100, with and without various management actions; and (5) considering the cost of each strategy in order to help land managers prioritize their on-the-ground actions to get the highest conservation return on investment. Conservation forecasting – when used by any land management agency – identifies strategies that can be easily embedded in the agency’s plans, provides a science-based foundation for its NEPA documents, and positions the agency to be eligible for additional funding sources.