Steering Committee Advances the Cooperative’s Conservation Planning Process
During the Workshop, Steering Committee members and invited experts began developing a process for articulating the Appalachian LCC’s priority resources – considering both natural and cultural resources.
A team of National Park Service (NPS) staff organized a full day of presentations and facilitated discussions aimed at how cultural resources can be incorporated into landscape planning and design along with natural resources. The presentations developed by NPS team provided an excellent orientation to the vast array of cultural resources (National Heritage Areas, traditional ecological knowledge, state historic preservation and national registry information, and related cultural geospatial datasets). NPS participants and Steering Committee members suggested the LCC review data needs for cultural resources, understand local values to help guide a strategy, and identify the common ground between biological and cultural resource conservation. Ongoing collaboration with the NPS has positioned the Appalachian LCC to serve as a case study of how NPS can work more closely with LCCs to integrate landscape-level planning.
Members of the Executive Board of the Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere (SAMAB) provided keen insights throughout the meeting pertaining to cultural resources and socio-economic aspects of conservation. SAMAB was established to work with regional, state, and local governments, individuals, and other interested organizations to develop a land ethic that recognizes the importance of ecologically sound management of natural and cultural resources in the Southern Appalachians. Success stories were presented by those partners who have previously made progress in integrating natural and cultural resource conservation in the Appalachians. Dr. Jim Fox, Director of the University of North Carolina-Asheville National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center, gave a demonstration of the “Vitality Index” tool developed by the Center and originally applied to community and watershed group decision-making in Western North Carolina. The Vitality Index reports on the 27 counties of Western North Carolina through the perspectives of the region’s natural, social, built, and economic environments. Angie Chandler, Executive Director of the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, then presented an illustrative demonstration of how partners were directly using the Vitality Index tool to allow planners, decision-makers, and the public access to information necessary to inspire discussion and craft decisions on issues impacting natural and cultural areas.
Partners at Clemson University and Appalachian LCC staff presented preliminary landscape modeling outputs from the open-source landscape design model MARXAN to begin to describe resource choices, solicit feedback regarding meeting future data needs and discussed developing a process to identify measureable priority resources for the Appalachians. After running through several model exercises that spurred in-depth conversations, the Steering Committee agreed to a process for articulating priority resources in the Appalachian LCC:
- Steering Committee members will submit nominees to a Technical Team (comprising of around 15 experts) to work with the Steering Committee on drafting a list of priority resources;
- The LCC will distribute the nominee list to the entire Steering Committee for comment and final approval;
- The LCC Chair will correspond with States and other appropriate data sources (e.g. NatureServe) to obtain datasets of interest to the LCC, especially species occurrence and key cultural resource datasets;
- The Technical Team will utilize Appalachian LCC Guiding Principles to set parameters on potential priorities for decision-making;
- The Technical Team will assess the quality and appropriateness of the datasets for use in landscape planning and design. They will determine which are of sufficient quality to support species-specific modeling and narrow down the list of priority resources;
- A select number of species will be modeled for suitable habitat.
A follow up webinar to the Steering Committee will take place in the coming months to give an update on these action items and the ongoing process for selecting priority resources.
