The North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative and Nature Trust of BC are hosting a webinar: Cross-Boundary Planning for Resilience and Restoration of Endangered Oak Savannah and Coastal Douglas-fir Forest Ecosystems.
The Georgia Basin supports a globally unique mix of dry forest and savannah habitats that evolved under historic climates and First Nations management. These extraordinary areas still provide ecosystem services essential to human health and well-being and are widely recognized for their outstanding beauty, recreational and economic values. However, most of this historic habitat has been converted to human use, and what remains will be lost without further investment in conservation and restoration.
The goal of this project was to develop a landscape planning tool to answer the question: can we maximize the biodiversity benefits of conservation investments by prioritizing land parcels and landscapes for acquisition and stewardship? To do so, researchers provide a web-based prioritization tool and tutorial designed to identify ‘optimal solutions’ to user-defined problems in the conservation of Coastal Douglas-fir, Garry oak/Arbutus savanna, and maritime meadow bird and plant communities.
The resulting NPLCC planning tool is described extensively in an companion tutorial and represents a state-of-the-art, web-based planning tool designed to facilitate the ability of land managers to prioritize land parcels for acquisition and stewardship based on the distributions of target and non-target communities as they exist now and are predicted to occur in 2045.