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About the Partnership
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Region-Based
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A role of the Appalachian LCC community -- representing scientists and natural and cultural resource managers from federal and state agencies, non-profit organizations, and tribal government representatives -- is to help coordinate and plan conservation actions at a landscape level. Based on guidance from this conservation community, the LCC staff and partners are identifying and concentrating their efforts in working with interested partners in "focal areas."
These initial areas of collaborative planning and coordinated action represent conservation zones -- identified through our EDIT Needed: Landscape Conservation Design modeling effort -- that offer conservation opportunities for long-term protection of immense and unique biodiversity by maintaining connectivity among natural lands and functioning ecosystems. Such strategic planning and collaboration will help address environmental threats that are beyond the ability of any one organization to tackle and lead to the protection of valued natural and cultural resources and continued delivery of environmental benefits to surrounding human communities across the Appalachians and its western river basin.
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Issue-Based
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Energy, climate change, ecosystem services, and how society values these services - such as clean drinking water, outdoor recreation, and biological conservation - are key issues influencing the Appalachian landscape. These issues and drivers of change are essential to understand and plan for in the management and protection of both natural and cultural resources in order to create a more sustainable landscape for wildlife and human communities.
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Implementation
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EDIT Needed: This area of the portal provides our community with vital information in order to accomplish the vision of landscape-scale conservation planning and design. Conservation planning is a process that identifies and prioritizes lands that encompass important natural and/or cultural resources across the landscape (e.g., critical watersheds, habitat for rare or threatened species) and develops protection and management strategies for these lands. Science is at the core of planning, but the science is informed by groups of stakeholders using their on-the-ground knowledge and expertise.
Where planning is the process, conservation design is the product. It can be a series of maps or data layers that illustrate the location of key focal landscapes and priority resources, or combined into decision support tools that can inform managers and conservations about the quality, quantity, and location of habitat needed to protect biodiversity. The successful conservation design product will provide public land managers, NGOs, and private landowners the ability to incorporate landscape data into their own local land-use decisions. The overall goal from the planning process and design products is to create interconnected reserves of managed lands that are resilient to the many environmental changes that are occurring rapidly on the landscape and can sustain biodiversity today and tomorrow.
Find below an overview of conservation planning science, GIS resources that aid in planning, products from our conservation design project, and online learning courses for partners wanting to utilize LCC-funded decision support tools in their conservation work.
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Conservation Planning & GIS
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A major role of the LCC is to think about and facilitate conservation planning at a larger spatial and temporal scale. Although there is a plethora of successful conservation agencies doing work on multiple scales throughout Appalachia, these efforts are often limited in scope. In order to accomplish the vision of landscape-scale conservation planning, the LCC has developed this integrated platform -- a planning tool -- for broad dissemination of key conservation literature, analytical products and information, and other resources to help guide land managers with on-the-ground conservation action throughout the region.
In this section of the portal you will find a framework that supports a systematic conservation planning effort, ranging from setting conservation targets to ultimately measuring conservation success. The web page navigation is presented as a series to allow the reader to progress in an intuitive and strategic planning manner. In addition, products such as a web-enabled map viewer or predictive modeling results and decision support tools that the user select key input variables can be dynamically executed.
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Implementation
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Resources
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Area for sharing files, videos, spreadsheets etc.
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Expertise Search
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The Appalachian LCC Member Directory encompasses a diverse range of individuals and expertise interested in participating in landscape conservation efforts throughout the region. When you join our Web Portal you become part of a searchable database. Members identifying areas of expertise within their profiles allow Portal members and the conservation community at large to search for experts from a wide range of fields as well as Network with those of similar research, project, habitat, and funding interests.
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Resources
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Images
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Resources
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Appalachian LCC Legacy
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Guiding Principles: Work at a Landscape Scale, Engage a Diversity of Partners, Adopt a Conservation Framework
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Resources
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Science
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