For State Wildlife Action Plans


Permeable Landscapes for Species of Greatest Conservation Need



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Permeable Landscapes for Species of Greatest Conservation Need


Another important aspect of habitat for fish and wildlife is permeability, or the ability of a heterogeneous land area to provide for passage of animals (also referred to as “habitat connectivity”). A follow up project by Anderson (ongoing), Permeable Landscapes for Species of Greatest Conservation Need, evaluates and maps the relative landscape permeability across the thirteen states, and determines how permeability coincides with the locations and habitat of species of greatest conservation need. The analysis uses new analytical tools applied to the Northeast Regional Habitat Map, and corroborated with species locations and land cover maps. The goal is to identify where the most important regional movement concentrations are, particularly those areas where movements may be funneled due to constriction in the landscape. The amount of flow, permeability and resistance present in the region’s roads and secured-lands network will also be measured. For project updates, please see: http://www.northatlanticlcc.org/projects/permeable-landscapes-for-species-of-greatest-conservation-need/permeable-landscapes-for-species-of-greatest-conservation-need.

Integrity of Ecological Systems


The NALCC’s Designing Sustainable Landscapes Project is developing a coarse filter ecological integrity approach to measuring the integrity of ecological systems in the Northeast. The project is based on a suite of ecological systems from the Northeast Terrestrial Habitat Classification System and the concept of landscape ecological integrity. This concept includes the ability of an area to sustain ecological functions including the ability to support biodiversity and the ecosystem processes necessary to sustain biodiversity over the long term. This definition thus accommodates the modification or adaptation of systems (in terms of composition and structure) over time to changing environments (e.g., as driven by climate change). Ecological integrity includes several measurable components, including diversity, connectivity, intactness, resiliency, and adaptive capacity that can be measured for ecological systems and the landscape as a whole. This coarse filter involves designing a landscape with a green infrastructure (i.e., undeveloped lands) containing a diversity of highly connected ecosystems with high intactness, resiliency and adaptive capacity. The ecological integrity assessment involves quantifying these five attributes to yield a combination of spatial and non-spatial results.

Spatial results include grids depicting the value of the local index of ecological integrity (IEI, which is a weighted combination of intactness and resiliency metrics) and adaptive capacity index as continuous surfaces that are useful for visually depicting the consequences of alternative landscape change scenarios and for choosing sites for conservation action (e.g., protection) in the context of landscape design. Summary statistics that will be provided for each of the five ecological integrity attributes for each ecological system or for the landscape as a whole will be useful for quantitatively summarizing and comparing among scenarios. The ecological integrity assessment was completed in pilot areas in the Northeast and will be available for the entire region by June 2014.



The next phase of this project, an Assessment of Landscape Changes in the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC), assesses the capability of habitats to sustain wildlife populations in the Northeastern United States in the face of urban growth, changing climate, and other disturbances and predict the impacts of landscape-level changes on the future capability of these habitats to support wildlife populations. For more information and project updates, please see: http://www.northatlanticlcc.org/projects/designing-sustainable-landscapes-phase-2 or http://www.umass.edu/landeco/research/nalcc/nalcc.html.

Resilient Sites for Species Conservation in the Northeast
and Mid-Atlantic


Resilience is the ability of a living system to adjust to climate change, to moderate potential damages, to take advantage of opportunities, or to cope with consequences; in short, it is capacity to adapt (IPCC 2007). This project identifies the most resilient examples of key geophysical settings (sand plains, granite mountains, limestone valleys, etc.) in relation to species of greatest conservation need, to provide conservationists with a view of the places where conservation is most likely to succeed. This was accomplished by measuring the landscape complexity and permeability of every 30 by 30 meter square of land in the region to create a set of maps of the individual and collective components of adaptive resilience. This information was applied to species sites representing the full spectrum of geophysical diversity in the region, and the scores compared among sites with a similar geophysical composition. This identifies a subset of sites with the highest ecological resilience and that collectively represent all the ecological settings critical to maintaining diversity in the region. This project report provides maps, summaries and detailed charts of how individual species are captured by the sites. For more information, please see: http://static.rcngrants.org/sites/default/files/final_reports/Resilient-Sites-for-Species-Conservation%281%29.pdf

Northeast Habitat Classification Systems


The Northeast states and their partners supported and developed common terrestrial and aquatic habitat classification systems for the region. The Northeast Lexicon (NEFWDTC 2013b) recommends the use of these classifications in the 2015 Wildlife Action Plan revisions for consistency and to advance applications of the Northeast Conservation Planning Framework. This section describes the sequential development of the classification systems, the data and spatial maps, and the supporting documents, including the habitat guides, which improve understanding and use of these classification systems and mapping tools. Further applications of these common habitat tools have resulted in additional analyses that provide regional information on habitat condition, connectivity, permeability and resilience. Each of these projects is summarized below.
The Northeast Terrestrial Wildlife Habitat Classification System (NETWHCS) is a flexible framework for characterizing wildlife habitat that works on two levels, habitat systems and structural modifiers (Gawler 2008) http://rcngrants.org/content/northeastern-terrestrial-wildlife-habitat-classification. The habitat system corresponds to the Ecological Systems developed by NatureServe, with additional systems added to recognize altered habitats and land-use types. Because most habitat systems can incorporate substantial variation in vegetative species dominance, successional stage, and other characteristics that are relevant to wildlife use, the classification superimposes a set of structural modifiers. The combination of habitat system with structural modifiers provides a powerful tool for assessing multiple dimensions of “habitat” in a single analysis. The NETWHCS has been designed for compatibility with existing habitat classification efforts in the Northeast, including LANDFIRE and the GAP Analysis Program. The habitat classification, presented in an Excel workbook with seven worksheets, is hierarchical for habitat systems consistent with the Federal Geographic Data Committee vegetation standard and can be scaled to different applications.

The Northeast Aquatic Habitat Classification System (NEAHCS) is a standardized classification system and GIS dataset describing and mapping stream systems, lakes, and ponds across the Northeast (Olivero and Anderson 2008) http://rcngrants.org/content/northeastern-aquatic-habitat-classification-project. The system and data consistently represent the natural flowing-water aquatic habitat types across this region in a manner that is useful for conservation planning. It was designed to unify state classifications and promote an understanding of aquatic biodiversity patterns across the entire region. The system is not intended to override local stream classifications but rather to put them into a broader context. This approach can be applied across regional scales using GIS modeled variables that shape aquatic habitats such as stream size, slope, elevation, climate, and geology. The GIS dataset of basic aquatic habitat using the NEAHCS can be downloaded by complete region or by individual Northeast states.




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